the eu, bologna and the next thousand-year reichschool and education system, and to evalu - ate it...

Current ConcernsThe international journal for independent thought, ethical standards, moral responsibility,

and for the promotion and respect of public international law, human rights and humanitarian law

11 February 2013No 6ISSN 1664-7963

Current Concerns PO BoxCH-8044 ZurichSwitzerland

Phone: +41 44 350 65 50Fax: +41 44 350 65 51

E-Mail: [email protected]: www.currentconcerns.ch English Edition of Zeit-Fragen

ab. We are reading with some uneasiness, how Bologna came to Switzerland. To trace the single steps and the persons who took them – as Barbara Müller has done in her book, “The beginnings of the Bolo-gna reform in Switzerland” – is one thing. The other would be to account for the po-litical-economic process of the ruinous 90s dominated by the American mission to make Europe a vassal from Lisbon to Vladivostok, as Brzezinski had illustrated. This would provide the basis to assess the “Anschluss”-intervention into our whole school and education system, and to evalu-ate it in its political and economic context.The Bologna Declaration was preceded by a so-called “Sorbonne Declaration” of 25 May 1998, that Ruth Dreifuss non-chalantly signed for Switzerland. It was about instilling a little spirit into the EU economic project. It reads as follows in the preamble:

“The European process has very recent-ly moved some extremely important steps ahead. Relevant as they are, they should not make one forget that Europe is not only that of the euro, of the banks and the economy: it must be a Europe of knowl-edge as well. We must strengthen and build upon the intellectual, cultural, social and technical dimensions of our continent. These have to a large extent been shaped by its universities, which continue to play a pivotal role for their development.”1

Two years later the Bologna Declara-tion – which is a declaration of intent – was still being worked on in the very af-ternoon prior to its public signing. No Swiss delegate is permitted to sign such a thing: He has to take the draft back home and submit it to our democratic bodies with the necessary time. He who can-not withstand champagne receptions and gloss-and-gloria performances such as the Bologna signing ceremony, must not represent Switzerland abroad. Interstate conferring has its rules and even more so in our direct democracy.

The following is important: In Swit-zerland there is no legal basis for the whole Pisa and Bologna magic. They were letters of intent, but no treaties. Switzerland is therefore free to make thenecessary corrections. In honor of the Swiss Rectors’ Conference it must be

said, however, that they had written to the Dreifuss’ department on 15 June 1999, that they did not want a signature. “We therefore request you not to take on any respective obligations in Bologna concerning the Swiss Universities.”2 Nev-ertheless, the Federal Councillor Drei-fuss’ secretary signed.

Meanwhile, the general political cli-mate is different. In 2008 the world has become aware of this with the bankrupt-cy of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the global economy. Europe in partic-ular is in a situation of crisis, which no one would have imagined five years ago. Is this the grand success of the Brzezins-ki-strategy? Shall our children read mere-ly trash and pulp at school to that end and shall the students (and incidentally, all graduates of higher education), just turn learning-morsels into credit-points? Will the ability to think and review sources and data no longer be needed? All that, howev-er, only for the European vassal states; the war-mongering superpowers educate their children in a different manner.

Therefore, we must not miss the next thousand-year Reich in the preamble to the Bologna Declaration:

“A Europe of knowledge is now wide-ly recognised as an irreplaceable factor

for social and human growth and as an indispensable component to consolidate and enrich the European citizenship, ca-pable of giving its citizens the neces-sary competences to face the challeng-es of the new millennium, together with an awareness of shared values and be-longing to a common social and cultural space. The importance of education and educational co-operation in the develop-ment and strengthening of stable, peace-ful and democratic societies is universal-ly acknowledged as paramount, the more so in view of the situation in South East Europe.”3

It should serve the “development of the European continent at large.” To this end, the NATO had shortly before “dumped” its uranium charges in Kosovo and in Ser-bia. And today’s Mediterranean, from Greece to Spain have their own ideas on this matter.

The European cultural space is older than the euro and Bologna. •

1 Sorbonne Joint Declaration, Paris, Sorbonne, 25 May 1998, p. 269/270

2 Barbara Müller. The beginnings of the Bologna re-form in Switzerland. Berne, 2012, p. 156

3 Bologna Declaration of 19 June 1999 www.crus.ch

The EU, Bologna and the next thousand-year Reich ...In Switzerland the road to corrections in school and education is clear

“[...] they should not make one forget that Europe is not only that of the euro, of the banks and the economy: it must be a Europe of knowledge as well.”

Sorbonne Joint Declaration, 25 May 1998

“We request you not to take any respective obligations in Bologna con-cerning the Swiss Universities.”

Letter of the Rectors’ Conference of the Swiss Universities of 15 June 1999 to the Federal Department of Home Affairs (FDMA)

“A Europe of knowledge ... [is] capable of giving its citizens the neces-sary competences to face the challenges of the new millennium, together with an awareness of shared values and belonging to a common social and cultural space.”

Bologna Declaration, 19 June 1999

http://www.crus.ch

No 6 11 February 2013 Current Concerns

Global corporations headquartered in Switzerland needed young people with higher (grammar school) education and university studies for their jobs, they don’t need apprentices – that’s what an executive of a Swiss companies’ think-tank recently announced. Therefore the academic numbers should be raised “no matter how” in Switzerland as well as in Germany.

As a Swiss vocational school teach-er with many years of experience, I must strongly warn against any attempt to di-minish the importance of dual vocation-al education in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – and if only to the smallest iota. Not that I want to deny the “Abitur” (grammar school examination) and uni-versity education for some young people, I have an academic degree, myself. But I will not tolerate if someone only hints at claiming that an academic career was in any way of higher value than vocation-al training and an apprenticeship for the young people themselves or for our econ-omy.

The fact is that the Swiss economy con-sists at over 90 percent of SMEs (small and medium enterprises), whose importance for our country is far more important than that of the global corporations that are often not even associated with Switzerland but have its headquarters today here and tomorrow in another country or on another continent. It is also true that, in Switzerland, Germa-ny and Austria, youth unemployment com-pared to other European countries is by far the deepest. This proves that the economy needs no more academics, but that Europe-an countries urgently need one thing above all: many cooperatives or other smaller companies who take on the youth and train apprentices. 80 percent of Swiss teenagers undergo and complete an apprenticeship – this could happen elsewhere, too. Howev-er, this would require some careful basic groundwork and quite a number of adults who consider it their responsibility to con-tribute to the training of the youth

In the course of my work at the voca-tional school I met thousands of appren-tices in various professions, who not only

matured to become good and reliable pro-fessionals in their three- or four-year ap-prenticeship under the guidance of their instructors, but have also taken their place as democracy-capable and responsible cit-izen in their communes and in their asso-ciations or other social institutions. Quite a few of my students have even started a further education after their apprentice-ship. Others found their satisfaction in training apprentices themselves and to pass on, what they received from their masters and teachers.

Especially at a time in which young people – besides the dangers of alcohol and drug addiction – must survive the nu-merous new threats by the digital tsuna-mi in order to become mature and social adults, the support they receive in their vo-cational training company and at their vo-cational school is of irreplaceable value.

Let us preserve and recommend the dual well-proved vocational training rath-er than letting us being distracted from this proven path by representatives of neo-liberal doctrines. •

Dual vocational education and training – a blessing for every country’s youth

by Dr iur Marianne Wüthrich

“The cantons are responsible for the school system”ev. Since the beginning of this year, university education and re-search, which so far had been sub-ordinated to the Federal Depart-ment of Home Affairs, and the job training, which had been located in the Department of Econom-ic Affairs, have been merged into a new State Secretariat for Edu-cation, Research and Innovation. First head of the new State Sec-retariat is Mauro Dell‘Ambrogio from Ticino. In the SRF 1-pro-gram “Talk of the day“ on 9 Janu-ary 2013 he made a few clarifying statements: He stated that the es-tablishment of the new State Sec-retariat did not mean a central-

ization of the Swiss educational system and no alteration of the constitutional responsibilities. In Article 62, Paragraph 1 of the Fed-eral Constitution it is clearly stat-ed: “The cantons are responsible for the school system.“

Accordingly Mauro dell‘ Am-brogio explained his new job: “This is an internal administra-tive reform. There is potential for efficiency. But it is not a re-form of the education and re-search system in Switzerland. The system is the same as be-fore. The laws are the same as before. The organization, struc-tures, the cantonal responsibili-

ties are exactly the same.“ And later in the interview: “In gen-eral education, the cantons are at work, operationally. The fed-eral government simply provides for money distribution between the ETH domain, subsidies to the cantons, international projects, etc.”

He primarily considers his task as “caring that things work, espe-cially that the system is not dam-aged.“ Since: “The system needs no revolution, I think it is not a failing enterprise. Just recently our educational system, our re-search have been still celebrated as the best in the world.“


continued on page 4

The orchestra plays Beethoven’s ninth symphony. “Joy, beautiful spark of the gods ...” University presidents and politi-cians with responsibility for educational matters from thirty countries are crowd-ed close together in the festively decorat-ed Aula Magna. Some move through the four A4 pages that have just been hand-ed out; the music drowns out the rustling of paper. What they are reading confirms their fears: Soon nothing will be the same at European universities as it has been so far.

It is 19 June 1999, a Saturday, when the European Ministers of Education sign a letter of intent at the University of Bologna, which will later be known as “Bologna Declaration”. Among them is a seven-member delegation from Swit-zerland, led by Charles Kleiber, Parlia-mentary Secretary for Education and Science.

These men set about to incite the great-est revolution at Swiss universities. Bolo-gna is a paradigm shift – particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Where students previously had to acquire knowl-edge on their own, had to pervade the sub-ject, education will henceforth be served to them bit by bit in module form.

An incredible story – absolutely underestimated in its effect

Today, ten years after the Bologna reform has been implemented at all Swiss uni-versities, a thesis tells for the first time, how “Bologna” came to Switzerland. It was written by the educationalist Bar-bara Müller from Zurich, a proponent of the reform.

It is the story of seven men who trig-ger off a revolution – and who catch them-selves by surprise in doing so. It is the story of an educational reform that has never been discussed in the public at large – but that has changed our idea of educa-tion completely. It is the story of a reform of which no one still knows what it will actually achieve. In short, it is an unbe-lievable story.

Or as Gerhard Schuwey, former direc-tor of the Federal Department for Educa-tion and Science, notes retrospectively: “To be honest, we must admit that the ef-fect has been completely underestimated not only in Switzerland.”

The celebration in Bologna boasts of Italian pomp, dark state carriages, drivers

and motorcycle queues. The Swiss dele-gation is impressed. In the auditorium the ministers are asked by roll call to come to the front to sign. “It would have been inconceivable for the Parliamentary Sec-retary not to sign, it would have been so compromising,” Rudolf Nägeli, who had travelled to Bologna as Secretary Gener-al of the German Rectors’ Conference, states now.

“The Bachelor-/Master-System ... not acceptable for Switzerland”

The die is cast. The Swiss Rectors how-ever were very skeptical about the an-nounced reforms. A week earlier, their plenary assembly had declared unam-biguously: “Even a brief discussion of the Bologna draft shows that the Bach-elor-/Master-System as proposed is not acceptable for Switzerland.”

On the eve of the signing ceremony, the Swiss meet for an informal dinner. The atmosphere is tense, because the in-vitation to the conference was very short-dated. There was no time for a broad discussion of the ideas. The rectors are worried that from now on policy will dic-tate the conditions to them. And especial-ly now, after they have secured their in-dependence in numerous referendums. The so far cantonal universities still get money from the state, but now they can decide themselves what they want to do with it. Parliamentary Secretary Kleiber, who dined with the European Ministers on that evening, remembers today: “The rectors came to my hotel. And they told me: ‘You cannot sign this paper!’ And then I told them I would sign, but we could still discuss the issue.”

I decide. I sign. No matter what you think. The Parliamentary Secretary’s at-titude was not surprising. “We have no choice,” Charles Kleiber had already said in a one-hour television interview a year earlier. “The universities are now way beyond history; they are prisoners of their archaic structures.” Kleiber takes office as a Parliamentary Secretary in order to change the university system. In advance, he even published a program-matic book – “The University of tomor-

row”. He sees himself as a prince who wakes the sleeping beauty university with a kiss. The trained architect wants to build a new academic world obeying the zeitgeist of the late 90s.

What the Euro is for economy, Bologna was supposed to be for scienceMore competit ion, more perfor-mance, more efficiency. And above all, more Europe. These are the slogans. What the Euro is for economy, Bolo-gna is supposed to be for science. The great wave of European integration has also affected the education system. And so this story has not begun just since the Aula Magna at Bologna, but in Paris in May 1998, when the world famous Sor-bonne celebrated its 800th anniversary, as Barbara Müller shows in her thesis.

The French Education Minister Claude Allègre had invited. He had a problem. The report of a government advisor had just delivered a damning indictment of the French universities. They were “confused, bureaucratic and anti-social”. They were a case for reforms. But how could Minister Allègre completely change the universities given the huge opposition on the part of the students and universities, professors, and institutions? Allègre’s idea was: inter-nationalism. If other countries were to re-form their universities, the pressure on the French universities would increase.

The aim of the Sorbonne Declaration was a “Europe of Knowledge”. For the first time a credit (scoring) system, se-mesters abroad, facilitated validation of the various diplomas.

An unnecessary signature provokes a storm of reforms ...

To give the statement more political weight in Europe, France was looking for more cosignatories. Switzerland is also inquired. Although the conditions at local universities have never ever been comparable to those in France or Italy – the quality of supervision of students is better, the study period is shorter, the dropout rates are lower – the former Fed-

“You cannot sign that!”How seven men instigate the greatest revolution at Swiss universities.

The incredible story of the Bologna reformsby Matthias Daum*

“With the best will in the world I cannot see anything positive in the Bologna reform,” Kurt Imhof says. “Except that by granting the bachelor degree we also certify superficial knowledge now.”

Prof Dr Kurt Imhof, Institute of Sociology of the University of Zurich

* Matthias Daum is a journalist. He writes for “Die Zeit” and is currently working on a book project on the Swiss agglomeration


”’You cannot sign that!‘” continued from page 3

eral Councilor Ruth Dreifuss signed the declaration. For good measure, she also submitted the paper to the universities. They were indifferent. “It was a gener-al statement, which you could basical-ly have nothing against,” Nivardo Ischi, Secretary General of the University Con-ference, recalls: “The skeptics may have thought: You can agree, the paper will change nothing.”

With her signature Federal Councillor Dreifuss provoked a storm of reforms. Following the French pressure is now exerted by the Italians. In Paris, they al-ready announce a new conference. In Bo-logna. And within these two and a half hours on a Saturday in June, the Edu-cation Ministers succeed in doing what the European Commission has not ac-complished in four years of negotiating: They agree on a new European universi-ty system.

... and a near side note develops a life of its own

“Bologna” would almost have stayed a side note in Switzerland, another agree-ment, a paper, signed by someone some-where. Just as Parliamentary Secretary Kleiber promised to the nervous univer-sity rectors several times on Friday night before the agreement was signed. The agreement is neither a treaty under inter-national law nor a state treaty. Therefore, it does not have to be submitted to parlia-ment. Even for Education Minister Ruth Dreifuss the conference in the north Ital-ian city of Bologna was not a priority – would she otherwise have sent her Parlia-mentary Secretary?

The reform, however, develops a life of its own. It bursts into a power vacu-um in the Swiss education policy. Poli-tics is losing influence; the universities are becoming more self-confident. The Rector is no longer a primus inter pares, but a CEO. The university is a compa-ny; the students are its customers. The Bologna reform provides an opportu-nity to consolidate the new balance of power.

Surprise attack by an “icebreaker”On 3 December 1999, the Rectors’ Con-ference meets for its plenary session. At the last agenda item ‘miscellaneous’ Peter Gomez, the new Rector of the Universi-ty of St. Gall, surprisingly took the floor: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce that the University of St. Gal-len is implementing the Bologna reform, and indeed completely and rather quick-ly, and we are reorganizing the entire uni-versity structure and are implementing a

radical curriculum reform, and in a year, so next fall, we will already make a start with it.”

All attendees were flabbergasted. Eve-ryone was silent. Questioning looks: “What is going on?”

Peter Gomez is the icebreaker, and other universities are following suit. First, the FIT Zurich, the University of Lucerne, then Basel, then the University of Italian Switzerland. “Everyone had the feeling that he had to do something”, says book author Barbara Müller: “Some imple-mented previously planned reforms; oth-ers came under pressure to take action. In any case, studies needed to modernize, they could not remain aesthetic and intel-lectually elitist.”

But what is the benefit of Bologna? To date, ten years after the reform had finally been introduced at all Swiss universities, no one can answer this question.

High cost of an aberrationThe bare facts are sobering. Only one sixth of all students change university for the master degree. Less than five per-cent of bachelor graduates go abroad for it. The default rate is only reduced by ten percent. The study periods are only slight-ly shorter. And until today there has been no research which shows that it has actu-ally become easier for bachelor-/master-graduates to find a job than it was for their predecessors, who studied in the licenti-ate system. Not to mention the costs that the reform has caused – and which no one can quantify.

There is lamenting at universities any-way, especially in the humanities and so-cial sciences. For them the reform implies the biggest changes.

Kurt Imhof is a firm opponent of the Bologna process. In interviews the Zurich sociologist spoke about bulimia-learning in higher education: “Devour, vomit out, forget.” For Kurt Imhof today’s “univer-sity is the continuation of school by other means”. Students do nothing but cram-ming. The idea that young, rational adults would educate themselves at universi-ties has been buried. The sociologist talks himself into a rage; he swears at the deval-uation of his profession, he swears at stu-dents who have to be forced to go to the li-braries, he swears at the service provider, into which the university has degenerated. “With the best will in the world I cannot see anything positive in the Bologna re-form,” Kurt Imhof says. “Except that by granting the bachelor degree we also cer-tify superficial knowledge now.”

So you ask him: Why did the profes-sors not resist more strongly? Silence on the line. Pause. Then Imhof says: “The secret of the implementation of Bologna is New Public Management. Its evalua-tion programs and performance meas-

urement provided orientation and re-lieved students and professors of having to orientate themselves. What should be done? “Bologna is an aberration we have to eliminate.”

Students incapacitatedOther Bologna critics do not think so. “You cannot roll it back,” says Achatz von Müller, medieval historian at the University of Basel. “We must not doubt about the principles, but need to think about how we could allow changes in the existing system.” Fully open stud-ies, sailing on the open sea of knowledge without a compass had been a problem for von Müller. “The idea of a modular-ized study is reasonable,” he says, “But we have paid dearly for it.” Students are incapacitated, they no longer follow their own interests, they only ask: “How many credit points do I need?”

The frustration about the implementation of Bologna also affects declared proponents of the reform. Take for example Angelika Linke, linguistics professor at the Universi-ty of Zurich: “Today Bologna is a complete-ly inflexible system, exceptions are no long-er possible. Many decisions are no longer made according to what is reasonable, but what is technically practicable at all under the requirements of computer-based man-agement of teaching and learning.”

A mixture of neo-liberalism and planned economy

It is an irony of history that it is precise-ly a reform that was set up to dismantle the archaic structures in the universities, that now leads to a technologization and ossification of the universities. The im-plementation of Bologna is a mixture of neo-liberalism and planned economy. In the name of increased competition, the central regulatory power of the rectorates and deaneries is strengthened. And hence their chief behavior. Professors tell how the rector furiously entered their office, after they had criticized Bologna public-ly: “You are always so negative!”

When asked why the professors did not resist more strongly, Angelika Linke an-swered: “Successful revolutions always address the structures, every historian will confirm that.”

On 19 June 1999 Charles Kleiber hears his name in the Aula Magna of Bologna. He steps forward, to the table, covered with red velvet: “I told myself, too bad that my name is not Xavier, Xa-vier Kleiber,” the Parliamentary Secre-tary recalls: “Then I could have written down an X”.

From the very beginning Bologna has been a bad joke in Switzerland. •Source: Die Zeit of 19.12.2012

(Translation Current Concerns)


Small classes are of no use, not even open lessons. The decisive factor is the teacher. This is what John Hattie is saying. Never heard of him? That’s going to change.

A new name circulates in education. You read it in papers and hear about him in lectures. Some of the most important German university researchers can no longer do without him. And soon, it can be prophesied, everybody will know him. People talk about the “Hattie factor” and “Hattie ranking”. And the question is raised, “What does Hattie say about that?” Since in Switzerland some edu-cational colleges and some school rep-resentatives in the communes pretend to have never heard about Germany and Austria having to “clear off” the whole reform nonsense, we will contribute some ideas below that cannot be ignored. Any-one who has gone hot in the zeal for re-form does well to come down from his tours, abandon the OECD bondage and reflect on how he can return down to earth, i.e. to reality in time. The era of “global nonsense” is expiring.

John Hattie – New Zealander, education researcher, professor at the University of Melbourne – published a book in 2008 that has electrified the educational world since then. “Visible Learning” is the title. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive answer to the most important question of educational re-search: What is good teaching?

That sounds arrogant, even mad, and it may even be so – a little at least. Be-cause John Hattie did what no one before him has ever tried: to look through all the English-speaking studies about success-ful learning worldwide, evaluate them and bring them together in a large syn-thesis of empirical research on teaching. He evaluated more than 800 meta-analy-ses, i.e. those kinds of studies that summa-rize the various studies on a certain topic, be it homework or supplementary lessons, vocabulary learning, work with parents or having to repeat a year.

Using statistical tools he created a me-ga-analysis from this meta-analysis, in-cluding more than 50,000 individual studies with 250 million participating stu-dents. For the various methods of teaching and learning conditions Hattie then reck-oned up a success factor, called effect size. It took Hattie fifteen years of research for his diligence work. In the end Hattie set up a kind of ranking of the most effective ed-ucational programs.

“Visible Learning” – the world’s largest database for research on teaching – made Hattie an international celebrity within a short time. The education supplement of

the British “Times” calls him the “world’s most influential education academic”. Others put his book on the same level with major international comparative stud-ies such as Pisa. And even critical articles bear titles as the following “Has John Hat-tie actually found the Holy Grail of educa-tional research?”

However, it is not only the dimension of his megalomaniacal project that jus-tifies Hattie’s reputation or the coldness of his scientific gaze (“there are enough opinions, what matters is measurable evi-dence”). The greatest explosive force lies in its findings. Since these findings cut across the educational debate in many countries. “We are passionately discussing the outer structures of schools and teach-ing,” Hattie criticizes. “They range at the very bottom of the list and are not impor-tant when it comes to learning.”

Thus, a school’s funding has little influ-ence on its students’ acquisition of knowl-edge. The situation is similar to the reduc-tion of class size, the favorite solution of teachers for problems of any kind. Small classes cost a lot of money, however in terms of learning outcomes they remain largely unprofitable. Class size ends up on 106th place in Hattie’s ranking. World-wide the competition between public and private schools is also attributed great im-portance. However, the school forms dif-fer only minimally when it comes to the learning progress of the students.

A good teacher may not waste time on unimportant things

Anyway, Hattie considers all the talk about best schools “almost irrelevant”. All evidence of his data show, says the re-searcher, that the biggest differences in the learning progress does not show be-tween schools, but between single class-es, and that means between individual teachers. This is Hattie’s central message, which he gleaned from the mountain of data: It is the individual educator who determines what students learn. All the other factors – the general conditions, the type of school or special teaching meth-ods – are rather secondary.

So it depends on the good teacher. It sounds banal, we would say. Everyone knows it, they say. But why does the po-litical world still set their effort on im-proving learning outcomes with structur-al reforms? Why does a controversy on methods flourish especially in the Ger-man school debate? And how come that all educators themselves play down their significance? Last year the Allensbach In-stitute asked teachers for their importance. 48 percent felt they had little or no impact

on their students, in contrast to the media, for example. Only a total of 8 percent as-signed a “very great” importance to them-selves.

Hattie’s findings refute such lack of in-fluence. He also contradicts all attempts to marginalize the teacher in the classroom. For Hattie a teacher must not be a mere facilitator, not an architect of learning en-vironments (“faciliator”). If he wants to achieve anything, a teacher must be un-derstood rather as a director, as “activa-tor” who has his class under control and always keeps an eye on everyone.

“The teacher is super-important!”by Martin Spiewak

continued on page 6

The Hattie study

The New Zealand education re-searcher John Hattie has investigat-ed what constitutes good teaching in a study of more than 800 meta-anal-yses, which combine another 50,000 individual studies. Overall, 250 mil-lion students were involved in the studies. His book “Visible Learn-ing” (2008) provides the most com-plete survey of global education re-search. Hattie constantly enlarges his database with new surveys. Here are some of the 136 effect sizes that Hat-tie assessed and rated in his book. They give an indication of the factors that – each by itself – inhibit and pro-mote learning.

What harmsWhat harms• havingtorepeataclass• excessivetelevisionviewing• longsummervacationWhat does not harm, but does not help• openclassroom• inter-yearteaching• web-basedteachingandlearningWhat helps little• smallclasssize• funding• discoverylearning• homework

What helpsWhat helps more•regularperformance-relatedtest-

ing•pre-schooltuition•teacher-guidedinstruction•additionalcoursesfortalentedstu-

dentsWhat helps a lot•teacherfeedback•problem-solvinginstruction•subject-specificteachertraining•programstopromotereading• a trustful relationship between

teacher and student


”‘The teacher is super-important!’” continued from page 5

For those affected by the ideas of ed-ucational reformism these statements are difficult to digest. Hattie would consider the idea bizarre that it is “best that students shape their learning processes for them-selves”, as propagated by the recently es-tablished initiative “School on the Move”. In his eyes, other favorite concepts of the school new-thinkers fail as well. This is especially true for “open classrooms” or “inter-year classes”. For both Hattie found almost no empirical evidence that they im-prove learning.

Neither is it true according to Hattie’s findings that individualization of teaching has a great learning impact per se. “Con-sidering the great hopes that one has as-sociated with the so-called individual de-velopment, you should think twice what is actually meant by the term,” warns Eck-hard Klieme. The Frankfurt school re-searcher was one of the first in Germa-ny who received Hatties great project. For him the results of the New Zealander’s re-search emphasize especially the impor-tance of structure for all good teaching.

It begins with a strict classroom man-agement. A good teacher should not

waste time on unimportant things, he must quickly recognize when to respond to a disturbance with rigor and when with humor. Even higher on the Hattie-scale ranks the “teacher clarity” i.e. that stu-dents understand what the teacher ex-pects them to do. Both conditions of suc-cess for effective teaching are greatly underestimated. They hardly play a role in teacher training. In the life of a stu-dent whole weeks of time for learning get lost alone by the teachers’ distribut-ing of cumbersome worksheets. Whole hours prove to be ineffective, because the teacher does not make clear from the very beginning what is important in the next 45 minutes.

Structured and disciplined, special-ized and always at the center of atten-tion: I know this type of teacher, some may say in Germany; you can find him in every “Gymnasium” (grammar school)! But as much as Hattie rejects the “learning coach”, who then and now makes a marginal remark from the side during lessons, as little is his research suitable to rehabilitate the traditional grammar school teacher who presents the benefits of a comprehensive expert knowledge to his students by means of lectures.

In fact a good teacher controls the classroom, according to Hattie from the first to the last minute. He does this, how-ever – and that is special – always from his students’ perspective. “A good teach-er sees his own teaching through the eyes of his students,” says Hattie. How this ex-actly works, is explained by the New Zea-land education researcher in his second book, which was published 2011. In “Vis-ible Learning for Teachers” John Hattie outlines a pedagogy of permanent self-re-flection.

It begins with the teacher’s attitude. Far too many teachers, Hattie criticizes, explain the lack of progress in learning by the deficits of their students: the lack of diligence, the wrong talent or lack of support by the parents. Instead, the teach-er must ask himself, Hattie recommends, what he did wrong when his class does not make any learning progresses.

Empirics apparently prove Hattie right. Learning progress of students can vary up to one whole grade, depending on who the teacher is. This difference in quality was made particularly evident a few years ago by an experiment in Sweden. Select-ed teachers had taken over a class in a de-prived area whose pupils had largely given themselves up. After a year their mood had changed and they had considerably reduced their learning deficits.

There are no educational magic formulas

Hattie’s ideal teacher is such a super hero, but one who systematically nurtures his self-doubts. He does not only regular-

continued on page 7

The importance of education

“The social character that the banks ur-gently need is not the financial hero, who is characterized by ruthlessness, selfishness and recklessness, and cer-tainly not the reincarnation of the ba-roque person who is paid in gold for each deed and every gesture. The so-cial character of the future is repre-sented instead by men and women who are persons in an empathic sense, equipped with the ability to establish connections, to reflect their own ac-tions and opinions, who allow self-cor-rection, accept the foreign, i.e. women and men for whom the old-fashioned common weal is not a borrowed word. Character - that is a matter of educa-tion, an education that immunizes against the unreal, which creates an increased ability to rely on experience, wisdom, moderation and empathy.”

Christian Olearius, Bernd Thiemann: “Bankenkrise. Siechtum mit System”

(Banking Crisis. Infirmity in a systematic way) in: “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” dated 8 December 2012


continued on page 8


ly control the achievement level of every student, with small tests that often do not take more than two or three minutes. He also makes students systematically judge his teaching. Such students’ statements – “I kept on my task during the whole les-son”, “I knew what I had to learn in this lesson” – can be obtained by multiple choice tests already at elementary level. For Germany, they were developed by the research group around Andreas Helmke. “With the right tools, students usually judge fairly and surprisingly accurately about teaching”, says the educational re-searcher from the University of Koblenz-Landau. Students can also assess well, what they are able to do. In Hattie’s rank-ing no other instrument shows a greater effect than the systematic self-assessment of students.

Hattie preaches a culture of “feedback”, and no other term is mentioned more often in his book. He hardly talks about praise, however, and he does not talk about pun-ishment. According to Hattie feedback to students should always be neutral, based solely on the teaching subject. Students wrong answers are really welcome in this concept. Hattie sees errors as the real driv-ing force behind all learning (“the essence of learning”).

The same applies to the teachers them-selves. It is true, you may look up in Hat-tie’s new book what teaching methods have proved to be particularly effective according to his mega-analysis. Among them was “direct instruction”, i.e. the teacher-centered instruction commonly misunderstood as teacher’s monologue. The New Zealander, however, detests each methodological dispute. For him, a good teacher has a wide repertoire of teaching

styles which he tries out – depending on the class, checks them “evidence-based” and – if necessary – dismisses them again. “There are no magic bullets”, says Hat-tie, there is no educational magic formula.

On the other hand, the New Zealander considers the emotional aspects of learn-ing non-negotiable. Without respect and appreciation, caring and trust, teaching will not succeed, he writes and gives ev-idence with impressive figures. Even the old-fashioned “love for the subject” expe-riences a revival with him. “Anyone who has read Hattie will never warn again of a cozy pedagogy”, says Ulrich Steffens form the Hessian Institute for Quality De-velopment quite mockingly, who concise-ly summarized Hattie’s key messages in some professional articles in German.

In the local school debate Hattie’s les-sons are provocative for all those involved – and at the same time a confirmation. So the first and foremost aim of school should be performance, however Hattie does not care about grades; teacher-centered les-sons work, he says, but only if the teacher talks little; teachers have an overwhelm-ing influence who they can only claim if they think about their students each and every moment. Education reformers may be upset about the fact that open teaching is mostly ineffective, traditionalists may be upset that the same applies for repeat-ing a class. And both fractions will hardly fancy that small classes contribute almost nothing to success in learning.

This may please money-conscious pol-iticians. If they read Hattie thoroughly, however, they may feel sick. The research-er explains their actions to be largely inef-fective. Hattie’s empiricism suggests that better learning results cannot be organ-ized from the outside; and certainly not in one or two terms of office. As long as ed-ucation policies only reach the surface of

school, but do not alter the deep structure – i.e. the actual teaching – they will re-main ineffective.

The emotional side of learningThe fact that 30 years of school reform in Germany have not left any mark on many classrooms seems to be the best ev-idence. The teachers’ associations should also take a close look. Good teachers are important. That is what they always said. They have however always kept the logi-cal implication a secret: that there are also bad representatives of their profession, whom we should prompt by all means to do better – or to change their job. Hattie calls the deliberate ignorance to recog-nize quality differences between teachers a “conspiracy of silence”.

The controversy over John Hattie’s work has not yet reached Germany. That will change. Forthcoming “Visible Learn-ing” will be published in German, in a translation of the Oldenburg education-al researcher Klaus Zierer. The findings of the New Zealander cannot be trans-ferred one-to-one to the German school reality. The meta-analysis he aggregated is based on English-speaking research, which in turn deals with the Anglo-Saxon education systems. When Hattie classifies school holidays as “harmful to learning”, he refers to the several months of vaca-tion periods in the United States or Aus-tralia. In our country, the effect is likely to be far lower.

Hence Klaus Zierer warns against a “Fast Food Hattie”. We should not rely solely on the numerical impact factor, but look exactly at each factor on learning tested by Hattie. Homework has only lit-tle effect in elementary schools; in higher classes, however, they well promote learn-

The “Gesellschaft für Bildung und Wissen, GBW e.V.” (Association for Education and Knowledge), founded in June 2010 has been dealing with the broad guidelines, conditions and consequences of the current compre-hensive education reform of schools and universities. It wants to contrib-ute to the public debate on the pur-pose, content and methods of this re-form.

At the recent annual meeting of GBW at the end of January 2013 the proceedings “Deceptions of the teaching reform” were published in the Quarterly Journal for Scientific Pedagogy (issue 3/2013). This edition refers to developments in Europe and also possible ways out are shown.

Two recent posts from members of GBW deal with the question of the ideological backgrounds and enforce-

ment strategies of today’s schools and higher education “reformers”. The first contribution, a lecture by Pro-fessor Jochen Krautz at the meeting of representatives of the Philologist Association of Lower Saxony in 2012, is titled “Economism in Education: ‘Menschenbilder’, Reform Strategies, Actors” and is published in the jour-nal of the Philologist Association of Lower Saxony, High School in Lower Saxony 1/2013 (www.phvn.de/images/krautz.pdf ). The second article, also by Jochen Krautz, is “Concept of Man in Education and Education System”. It is also published in the Quarterly Journal for Scientific Pedagogy (issue 3/2012) and can be found on the in-ternet under http://bildung-wissen.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Gym-nasium-in-NDS-1-2013.pdf.(Translation Current Concerns)



ds. Last time voices multiply which again put the teacher and the teacher’s person-ality into the center of discussion about what a good school must be like. So the book of Michael Felten: “Auf die Lehrer kommt es an! Für die Rückkehr der Päd-agogik in die Schule.” (It depends on the teachers! In favor of the school’s return to education.)

After a long period of “educational deregulation”, characterized by structu-ral and methodological debates, the book wants to focus again on the strength of the teacher – and thus on the importance of the adult in education.

Felten’s theses are: “The teacher is the one who has to lead a group of students – in a self-confident and committed man-ner – and that takes more than nice work-sheets and a laptop cart.

The teacher is the one who has to ar-range and control the learning processes in a sensible and useful way – open lear-ning methods, however, are effective only in well-defined learning situations.

The teacher is the one who can resolve learning difficulties – not by reduction of standards but by professional insight into the student’s psyche, as part of a hear-ty and supportive relationship.” School needs a new commitment to pedagogy – to the pleasure of guiding as well as to sensitivity.

According to Michael Felten after 40 years of education reform, the resumé is highly ambivalent as well in regard to the lessons contents. Michael Felten lets the

former director of the Max Planck Insti-tute for Psychological Research in Munich speak, who as early as in 1999 character-ized the “errors of the school reformers” with unusual clarity: “They underestimat-ed the importance of knowledge for the acquisition of key skills, they overesti-mated the ability to self-determination of the learning student; they tried to level off the differences in performance, they main-ly wanted to optimize learning quality by changing the organization of school.

In fact learning achievements can only be increases if the quality of teaching is improved, the teaching had to care espe-cially for a better understanding of the contents by the students, and therefore you had to employ a higher level of differ-enciation, more variety and fewer interme-diate marks. Good teaching was said to be that kind of learning organization that con-veyed both – intelligent knowledge (with the “direct Instruction”as the most appro-priate method) as well as the use of perfor-mance skills (particularly useful by a well initiated project work).” (P. 64)

Michael Felten’s book not only uncov-ers the errors of the school reformers. It is primarily directed forward and gives teachers some good advice with examples and explanations for designing their own lessons. “The teacher shall and must be the helmsman of learning again.” •

Michael Felten, Auf die Lehrer kommt es an! Für eine Rückkehr der Pädagogik in die Schule, Güter-sloh 2010, ISBN 978-3-579-06882-4

For 28 years Michael Felten has worked as a teacher of mathematics and art in Cologne. He also is the author of instruc-tion materials, numerious books and edu-cational essays in the press and the radio. His publications include: “Kinder wollen etwas leisten” (2000), “Neue Mythen in der Pädagogik – Warum eine gute Schule nicht nur Spass machen kann” (2001), “Schule besser meistern – Kinder heraus-fordern und ermutigen” (2006), “Schluss mit dem Bildungsgerede! Eine Anstiftung zu pädagogischem Eigensinn.” (2012)

“The teacher shall and must be the helmsman of learning again”!

ing success. In Hattie’s ranking, the aver-age effect size for “homework” is some-where in the middle.

An open classroom can also be quite profitable – if the students are capable of independent learning and the teach-ers prepare thoroughly and meticulously watch over its course. However, Hattie’s research shows that both apply rath-er rarely. And of course, school pursues other objectives than to make students work with intellectual top performance.

Creativity or ability for democracy, a sense for aesthetic and social behavior does not appear in Hattie’s lists as learn-ing objectives. He is only interested in “achievements”, measurable cognitive specialist achievements. They are simply the core business of school.

Hattie’s findings can change the ed-ucation policy debate in Germany. “No one who talks about school can ignore it,” says Andreas Helmke. We must not “fun-damentally rethink our education system”, as the initiative “School on the Move” de-mands. System issues should no longer be raised according to Hattie. The New Zea-

lander puts the teacher back to where he belongs: at the center of all the debate about school. He is primarily responsi-ble for what students learn. He will de-cide whether school becomes better. “The schools finally should be able to work in peace”, is a popular demand after years of hectic school reforms. It is addressed to our education politicians. But for our teachers it applies equally. •This article as an audio file in the premium area at: www.zeit.de audio /

Source: Die Zeit of 3.1.2013



ts. The founding fathers of the Swiss fed-eral state of 1848 knew one thing for sure: a modern democratic society will only live fully by and with citizens who possess a minimum level of education. Of course in the mid-19th Century in Switzerland much was already given what one could make use of: The cooperative structure of the Confederation had provided a training in peaceful problem solving in the course of the centuries, which was unique for its time. The cooperatives, in which each member was equal before the law, were schools of a democratic living together – long before 1848.

The Federal Constitution of 1848, and that has not changed until now, settled the question of education in such a way that the cantons had the educational authori-ty. From this federalist ground a variety of educational legal articles emerged that formulated the high concern in a very dif-ferentiated way according to their own tra-ditions. Even today the reader marvels at this great treasure and precious nature of the articles, which are laid down in the re-

spective Cantonal Constitutions and the relevant laws and regulations – a thriv-ing example of the benefits of a commu-nity, constructed in a federalist manner from bottom up in which the diversity of the country and its citizens is reflected in a healthy and mutually stimulating compe-tition of thoughts and ideas in magnificent constitutional and statutory references. How skinny read in contrast educational articles in central states that are imposed without regard to tradition, religious and cultural background top down measuring the diversity of human creativity and inge-nuity with the same yardstick letting them wither, this way.

Another pleasant feature of federalism is the fact that there is neither uniformity nor the striving for the latter. That is why the cantons adopted the articles dealing with education in different years. Since the cantons let the people confirm their constitutions and laws on their own au-thority, without asking for permission in federal Berne, the reading of the various educational items also conveys an insight

into the historical development and the predominant basic ideas of the respective times of their drafting.

Below Current Concerns prints the ed-ucation articles of all Swiss cantons. May the variety of expressing the thoughts and concerns extort the adequate respect from the reader – the respect for the achieve-ment of the people in the municipali-ties and cantons, who want to make our youth capable of democracy and immune to propaganda and affections of power. Only Brussel’s centralists and education-al bureaucrats as well as dealers in edu-cation like Bertelsmann & Co will not re-joice in Swiss federalism, one of the four pillars of the peace model Switzerland, since it is impossible – with this diversity in unity – to make cash with their abso-lutely anti-democratic and uniform mash.

The culturally diverse population in each Canton will go on shaping their can-tonal constitutional obligation for school and education, depending on their respec-tive priorities. •

Direct democracy needs good educationThe federal Swiss education system – a jewel of diversity in unity

Cantons Legal regulations of the Cantons’ educational mission

Aargau Aargau Education Act of 17 March 1981 (as of 1 January 2011)The Grand Council (Cantonal Parliament) of the Canton of Aargau. Having regard to §§ 28–35 and 38bis of the State Constitution, with the intention of providing the Can-ton of Aargau with schools in which our youth is educated to reverence for the divine and respect for fellow human beings and for the environment, to independent and responsible citizens, to socially competent people, maturing in mind and soul, in which the youth is able to develop their creative powers and where they will be introduced to the world of knowledge and work [...]

Appenzell Ausserrhoden

Act on Schools and Education (School Act) of 24 September 2000 (as of 1 August 2009)

The voters of Appenzell Ausserrhoden,

Having regard to Articles 36–38 of the constitution of the Canton of Appenzell A. Rh. of 30 April 1995 [1], decree:

Article 2 Goals of Education

1 It is the task of education to promote the development of a self-responsible person-ality, the will to social justice, the respect for our fellow human beings, in particular for the other gender, and responsibility for our shared world.

2 Together with the parents schools provide an education suitable to the talents and abilities of the learners in a non-violent milieu that is as free of addiction as possible.

3 The goal of education is the promotion of knowledge, skills, ethical attitudes, learn-ing ability and the lifelong readiness to learn. Education should enable people to deliver cultural, social and economic performance.



Appenzell Innerrhoden

School Act of 25 April 2004

The assembly of voters of the Canton of Appenzell I.Rh., Having regard to Articles 12, 20 par. 1, 46 par. 1–4 and 47 of the Cantonal Constitution of 24 winter month 1872,2Article 2 1 Schools support the holders of parental authority in educating the child to be an

independent, life-affirming and socially competent person. They are run on Chris-tian principles.

2 They promote the harmonious development of the students’ physical, mental and spiritual strength. They provide basic knowledge and skills, access to different areas of culture and induce independent thinking and acting.

3 They educate the students in accordance with the principles of democracy, freedom and social justice within the scope of the constitutional state to be a responsible and tolerant person and citizen.

4 School authorities, teachers and holders of parental authority co-operate in the in-terest of the child in order to achieve the schools’ goals.

Basel-Landschaft Act on Education of 6 June 2002 (1) || in force since 1 August 2003

Effective date: 1 January 2013 (retrospectively); Corresponds to print version: 91 – 1.9.2013

The parliament of the Canton Basel-Landschaft decrees:Part One: Basic regulations

A. General

§ 2 Goals

1 Education is a comprehensive and lifelong process which promotes people in their spiritual, physical, mental, cultural and social abilities appropriate to their age and which calls for their motivation. The educational system feels obliged to the Chris-tian, humanistic and democratic tradition.

2 The offered types of educational paths are equivalent. Schools, teaching activities and other educational institutions provide the students

and the students of vocational schools with the necessary knowledge for their lives and strengthen their self-confidence. Besides, they respect their gender and cultural identity and teach values, which enable them to behave responsibly towards other people and the environment.

3 Students and students of vocational schools contribute to the success of their edu-cation according to their age. They respect the rules of schools.

4 The parents account for the education of their children. They promote their moti-vation and support the work of the schools as well as the teachers and other train-ing staff.

5 The authorities promote the inter-communal and inter-cantonal cooperation in the ed-ucational system and contribute to a continuous advancement of schools in their care.

6 Schools and their authorities as well as the departments of educational manage-ment, cultural management and sports management take into account the princi-ples of the gender-differentiated educational theory.

Basel-City School Act of 4 April 1929 (actual status: 1 January 2013)

The parliament of the Canton Basel-City,Having regard to §§ 12 and 13 of the Cantonal Constitution of 2 December 1889 [1] decrees the following:§ 3a.7) The elementary school and the continuing secondary schools have the task to promote the physical and mental development of students in addition and support of family education in such a way that they are able to meet the general human require-ments of everyday life as well as the vocational requirements.



Basel-City § 3b.8) The elementary school provides pupils with the necessary knowledge and skills for a successful life in society and in the vocational world. At the same time it also sup-ports the students in finding their personal identity in society and developing their ability to lifelong learning as well as to act responsibly towards themselves, the other people and the environment.

Berne Elementary School Act (VSG) 19 March 1992

The Parliament of the Canton of Berne,Having regard to Article 87 of the Cantonal Constitution [Repealed by the constitu-tion of the Canton Berne of 6 June 1993; BSG 101.1], at request of the governing coun-cil, decides:

Article 2 Tasks

1 The elementary school supports the family in the education of the children.

2 It contributes to the harmonious development of the abilities of young people based on the western Christian and democratic tradition. [Version of 5 September 2001]

3 It protects the mental-spiritual and physical integrity of the students and provides for a climate of respect and confidence. [Version of 5 September 2001]

4 It arouses their will to tolerance and to responsible behavior towards people and the environment as well as the understanding for other languages and cultures. [Ver-sion of 5 September 2001]

5 The elementary school teaches the knowledge and skills which constitute the basis for vocational education, for secondary education and for lifelong learning. [Cor-responds to the previous paragraph 4]

Fribourg Act of 23 May 1985 on kindergarten, primary school and the orientation stage – first two years of secondary education (Education Act)

The Grand Council (Cantonal Parliament) of the Canton of Fribourg, Having regard to Articles 17, 18, 19, 76 and 77 of the State Constitution;in agreement with the message of the State Council of 17 May 1983; at the request of that authority,

decrees:General Provisions

Article 2: Purpose and orientation of schools

1 Schools support parents in the training and education of their children.2 They are based on the Christian image of man, and the respect of fundamental

rights.3 They help the child to know his or her country in its diversity, and encourage him or

her to open minds to the entire human community.

Article 3: Goals of school

Schools contribute to the fact that:a) children can develop their intellectual and creative skills by helping them to acquire

the basic skills and aptitudes;b) children’s characters are formed and their judgment encouraged;c) children’s physical abilities are developed;d) children’s abilities to behave responsibly towards others and towards society are en-

couraged;e) children’s spiritual and religious development is encouraged with respect to the

freedom of religion and conscience.



Geneva Compulsory Education Act of the Canton of GenevaChapter II Elementary School Article 4: Goals of Elementary SchoolsDue to the respect for the personality of each individual compulsory education has the goal:a) to give each student the means to acquire the best knowledge in regard to his/her

future activities and try to arouse his/her constant need for learning and educating themselves;

b) to help each student develop in a balanced way his/her personality, creativity, and intellectual, manual, physical and artistic skills;

c) to ensure respect for the student’s choice of education within the scope of neces-sary conditions;

d) to prepare everybody to participate in the social, cultural, civil, political and eco-nomic life of the country by consolidating the sense of responsibility, judgment and the independence of the judgment;

e) to raise awareness in each student of his/her affiliation to the world that surrounds him, by promoting their respect of others, their spirit of solidarity and cooperation, and their awareness of the importance of sustainable development goals;

f) to seek to ensure that the inequality with respect to the academic success of the stu-dent is corrected from the early school years.

Glarus Education Act (Act on School and Education)

(Decreed on 6 May 2001 by the Landsgemeinde – open-air assembly of all citizens of the canton who are entitled to vote)

Article 2: Educational goals1 Compulsory education provides the students with education appropriate to their

aptitudes and abilities.2 In cooperation with the parents, schools promote the mental and spiritual, social

and physical development of learners.3 They awaken an understanding of people and the environment and educate the

learners, based on Christian principles, to be independent and responsible members of the community.

4 Schools promote the creative power, a willingness to learn and broadens the learners’ knowledge and judgment in terms of an appropriate organisation and mastering of life.

Grisons Act for Compulsory Education in the Canton Grisons (Education Act) of 21 March 2012

The Grand Council of the Canton of Grisons,

Having regard to Article 31, paragraph 1 and Article 89, paragraph 2 of the Cantonal Con-stitution, and in agreement with the message of the Government of 5 July 2011 decrees:

Article 21 With due regard to the historical development of the linguistic and cultural iden-

tity of the community, schools strive to educate the students to an attitude that is based on Christian, humanist and democratic values.

2 Schools promote the judgment, the creative power, the knowledge and the moti-vation of children and adolescents. They support them in their development as in-dependent personalities, in their acquisition of social skills as well as on the way to behave responsibly towards other people and the environment.

3 Schools support and complement education within the family.4 During compulsory education students develop all basic knowledge and skills that

allow them to learn for life and find their place in society and in the workplace.5 Education acquired during elementary education encompasses in particular care

and knowledge of the school language, and basic skills in other languages, math-ematics and natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, music, art and design, physical activity and health.

6 Schools take account of the interests and needs of children and youth with special needs, with special talents and with foreign-language background.



Jura Elementary Education Act of 20 December 1990Tasks of SchoolsArticle 21. In cooperation with their families, schools meet the children’s needs for instruction

and education.2. They respect the children’s dignity, personality and developmental stage.3. They seek to correct any disparities of opportunity in relation to academic success.Goals of SchoolsArticle 3 Using the various means at their disposal, schoolsa) teach their students to master basic knowledge and to work independently, b) offer children the opportunity to shape their personality, to develop their intellec-

tual, manual and physical skills, to promote their aesthetic and spiritual sensitivity and to express their creativity;

c) prepare children to actively play their role in society;d) make children aware they belong to the world around them by developing their

sense of brotherhood, cooperation and tolerance;e) make children familiar with foreign languages and enable them to develop their

knowledge of some of them.

Lucerne Elementary Education Act of 22 March 1999 (as of 1 August 2011)

The Grand Council of the Canton of Lucerne, having considered the message of the Governing Council of 21 November 1997, decrees:§ 3 Principle

Public elementary schools are politically and denominationally neutral.II Educational goals

§ 4 General educational goal1 The aim of education is the constant, specific and systematic advancement of knowl-

edge, of skills, of ethically and religiously grounded values, social competence and the ability to learn as well as of each individual’s willingness to learn how to mean-ingfully manage and organize his or her life.

2 Education promotes the ability to reflect, to act and to develop in each individual, in their communities and in society.

3 It empowers people to render services to the community, to help shape social, cul-tural and economic life, and to prove themselves in it.

§ 5 Elementary school goals1 Elementary schools teach their students basic knowledge, basic skills and attitudes,

and promote the development of miscellaneous interests.2 Elementary schoolsa) contribute to the comprehensive development of the individual by promoting spir-

itual, mental and physical strength, b) are oriented towards – emanating from Western Christian and democratic tradition

– principles and values such as freedom, justice, tolerance, solidarity and equal op-portunities and guides children towards them,

c) promote self-respect, self-responsibility, respect and consideration for others and the social world, as well as equality between men and women and the appreciation of religions and cultures. They raise the willingness and the ability to manage and solve conflicts without violence,

d) impart the skills and knowledge that will enable their students to cope with and shape their living conditions, to lay the basis for secondary schooling and for later professional training, and to create their own way of life,

e) encourage the capacity for independent, lifelong learning by keeping alive curios-ity and the joy of learning, by encouraging individual initiative and expanding the capacity for sane judgment,

f) arouses interest and willingness to participate on all levels in shaping a state which serves the common weal,

3 In addition to the family’s and the legal guardians’ work elementary schools per-form the common educational mission, taking social influences into account.



Neuchâtel Educational article in the Elementary Education Act of the Canton of Neuchâtel of 28 March 1984

Goals

Article 10

1 Schools within the compulsory education accomplish the training, in particular by supporting the acquisition of skills necessary for integration into social and pro-fessional life.

2 In cooperation with the family they contribute to education and development of the child by developing his abilities, talents and his sense of responsibility.

3 They accomplish these goals through a progressive education, adapted to the chil-dren’s abilities.

Nidwalden Act on Elementary Schools (Elementary School Act, VSG) of 17 April 2002

The Cantonal Parliament of Nidwalden,

Having regard to Articles 60 and in implementation of Articles 14, 15, 18, 20, 24 and 72 of the Cantonal Constitution decrees:

Article 3 Mission

1 Elementary schools:1. promote the formation of spiritual, physical and emotional skills of students;2. promote respect for themselves, for others and the environment as well as social

behavior;3. teach basic knowledge and skills; 4. contribute to the recognition of contexts and promote judgment;5. strive to awaken and maintain the pleasure in learning and performance.

2 Lessons take into account the performance and the individual talents and interests of the children.

3 Schools support parents in raising their children. School authorities, teachers and parents work together.

Obwalden Education Act of 16 March 2006

The Cantonal Council of Obwalden,Having regard to Articles 26 to 29 and 60 of the State Constitution of 19 May 1968 decrees:

I. General Provisions

A. Scope and educational goals

Article 2 Educational goals

1 In the context of this act, the educational system provides children, young people and adults with an education in accordance with their talents, aptitudes and inter-ests and promotes awareness of the importance of lifelong learning.

2 Public schools:a) educate towards a behavior that is based on Christian, humanist and democratic

values;b) encourage the development of an independent, responsible, tolerant and pen-

sive personality;c) create the basis for shaping the social, cultural and economic life as well as a re-

sponsible behavior towards the environment.

3 In fulfilling their tasks, public schools and their authorities comply with the applica-tion of a gender-sensitive pedagogy.

4 All persons involved in education cooperate in order to reach those goals.



St. Gall Education Act of 13 January 1983

The Grand Council (Parliament) of the Canton of St. Gall in application of Articles 2 to 8 of the Constitution on 16 November 1890 decrees as law:

Educational mission

Article 3 1 Elementary schools support parents in the upbringing of the child toward a life-af-

firming, efficient and socially responsible person. They are run according to Chris-tian principles.

2 They promote the different and diverse talents and natures of students. They teach them the basic knowledge and skills, provide access to the various areas of culture and guide them toward independent thinking and acting.

3 They educate the students to be responsible persons and citizens according to the principles of democracy, freedom and social justice within the constitutional state.

Schaffhausen Education Act of 27 April 1981

The Grand Council (Cantonal Parliament) of the Canton of Schaffhausen decrees as law:

Article 3

1 It is the goal of our education to train good and happy people. Therefore, schools – together with the homes – encourage the ethical and religious, intellectual and physical abilities of the children.

2 In the area of ethical-religious education schools arouse the reverence for creation, the responsibility towards nature, the love of the fellow human beings, a sense of community and the joy of beauty.

3 In the area of mental-theoretical education schools train both the mind and the crit-ical judgment. Moreover, it teaches the basics for later professional training and life in the family.

4 In the area of practical-physical education schools promote the agility and health of the students as well as their manual skills.

5 With the musical-creative education schools awaken the interest and understand-ing of artistic values and messages, promote and expand the virtues of imagination and the individual means of expression.

Schwyz Regulation on Elementary Education (of 19 October 2005)

The Cantonal Council (Parliament) of the Canton of Schwyz,

Having regard to § 40 point (e) of the Constitution, decrees:

§ 2 Principle

1 Public elementary schools focus on an education in Christian, humanist and demo-cratic values.

2 They ensure the same educational opportunities to all children and young people without regard to sex, religion, social and regional origin.

§ 3 Purpose

1 Elementary education provides an adequate basic education according to the pre-dispositions and aptitudes of the pupils.

2 It promotes the development towards independent, responsible personalities and lays the foundations for coexistence in society and democracy, for the social and economic empowerment and responsible behavior towards the environment.

3 Within its educational mandate it cooperatively supports the parents in their education.



Solothurn Education Act of 14 September 1969 (as of 1 January 2009)

The Cantonal Council (Parliament) of Solothurn having regard to Article 47 of the Con-stitution of 23 October 1887 decrees:

§ 1 Goals of elementary education

1 Solothurn elementary schools support the family in the upbringing of children to-ward people who know their responsibility before God and for their fellows and act accordingly. They develop the emotional, mental, and physical skills in a harmonious way, educate the independent thinking and working and provide basic knowledge for a successful life.

2 Schools respect the freedoms of denomination and conscience. They integrate chil-dren of different backgrounds into the community, promote the education of re-sponsibility in our democratic nation and arouse respect for native characteristics.

Ticino Education Act of 1 February 1990

After examination of the Cantonal Council’s message of 30 June 1987, n. 3220, the Grand Council of the Republic and the Canton Ticino decrees:

Definition

Article 11 Public schools are an institution of education at the service of individuals and society.2 They are established and administered by the Canton in cooperation with the local

authorities.3 Lessons are taught in Italian and in compliance with the freedom of conscience.4 Those involved in the administration of schools follow the rules laid down in law.

Goals

Article 21 In collaboration with the family and other educational institutions schools encour-

age the harmonious development of the individual and enable him or her to take an active and responsible role in society and to realize the principles of justice and freedom.

2 By particularly working towards the integration of the social and cultural reality and a perspective of the ongoing educationa) schools educate the individual toward a conscious choice of an individual role

through the mediation and the critical and scientifically correct processing of the basic cultural elements in a pluralistic view that is historically rooted in the real-ity of the country;

b) they develop the sense of responsibility and educate for peace, for respect for the environment and the democratic ideals;

c) they promote the citizens’ integration into the social environment by means of an effective and sustainable basic education;

d) they promote the principle of equality of men and women, endeavoring to bal-ance the socio-cultural differences, and reducing the barriers that affect the pu-pils´ education.

Thurgau Act on Elementary Education of 29 August 2007

Goals

§ 2 Elementary schools promote the children’s spiritual, emotional and physical capa-bilities. In addition to the parents’ educational mission they educate the children ac-cording to Christian principles and democratic values to become independent person-alities who are able to cope with life and feel responsible towards their fellow human beings and the environment.

§ 4 In elementary schools equal opportunities are sought and the children’s particular needs are taken into account.



Uri Act on Schools and Education (Education Act) (2 March 1997, as of 1 January 2008)

The people of Uri,

Having regard to Articles 43 and 90 paragraph 1 of the State Constitution decrees:

Article 2 Educational goals

1 Schools serve the education of students.

2 They support and promote the holistic development of students and strive to edu-cate them to be independent and tolerant people who engage in the community and for the environment in a responsible way. They are committed to Western Chris-tian culture and to democratic principles.

3 They provide the students with a contemporary education that is appropriate to their talents.

4 In order to achieve these goals, schools cooperate with parents, approved churches under public law, social institutions and other professional bodies.

Vaud Elementary Education Act of the Canton of Vaud, 7 June 2011 (will come into effect on 1 August 2013)

Article 5 Goals of schools

1. Schools accomplish the children’s education in cooperation with the parents. They support parents in their educational tasks.

2. They offer all students the best opportunities for development, integration and learning, particularly through work and personal commitment. They aspire academ-ic achievement and equal opportunities.

3. In particular, they assist the children in acquiring knowledge, techniques and meth-odology to develop and perform their intellectual, manual, creative and physical skills, to shape their ability to judgment and their personality in order to enable them – through their knowledge about themselves and the world around them – to find their proper place in society.

Valais Act on Public Education, 4 July 1962

The Grand Council of the Canton of Valais willing to promote education of the youth, contemplating the need to build the various levels of education as planned; having consulted the articles 2, 13, 15 and 18 of the State Constitution, at the request of the State Council decrees to

Article 3

2 General tasks of schools

The general task of the Valais schools is to help the family in the education and train-ing of their youth. To this end, it strives to cooperate with the approved churches under public law (here-inafter referred to as churches).It strives to develop the moral, intellectual and physical talents of the students and prepare them for their tasks as fellow beings and Christians.

Art. 3 bis

2 Information, consultation, participation

The school authorities maintain the necessary relationships with parents, teachers and their associations as well as with the churches and interested parties through informa-tion, consultation, participation or other means.Schools may enlist religious, cultural, economic, political and social circles to par-ticipate.



Zug Education Act of 27 September 1990

The Cantonal Council of the Canton of Zug, having regard to §§ 4 and 41 lit. b of the Cantonal Constitution [1] decrees:

§ 3 Educational mission

1 Schools serve the education and upbringing of children in collaboration with the parents and the churches.

2 In this sense, they promote the mental and spiritual as well as the physical devel-opment of children and are committed to educate independent people, lively and full of character, based on democratic and Christian principles, who act responsi-bly towards the community and the environment.

3 Schools teach students the knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes for their per-sonal and professional future. Education is focused on lifelong learning.

Zurich Education Act of 7 February 2005

After examination of the motion by the Commission for Education and Culture of 31 August 2004,

the Cantonal Council decrees:

Goals of education

§2

1 Elementary schools educate to a behaviour that is committed to the Christian, hu-manist and democratic values. They respect the freedom of religion and conscience and take minorities into account. They equally promote girls and boys.

2 Elementary schools complement the child’s upbringing within the family. School au-thorities, teachers, parents and, if required, youth welfare services cooperate.

3 Elementary schools fulfill their educational mission by shaping lessons and living to-gether in school.

4 Elementary school teaches core knowledge and skills; it leads to an understanding of how things are linked. It encourages respect for others and for the environment, and aims to ensure that children develop comprehensively into independent, so-cially competent people. Schools strive for encouraging and maintaining the joy in learning and achievement. It especially promotes the desire for responsibility, good performance, judgment and criticism as well as the openness for dialogue. Lessons take care of the children’s individual talents and inclinations and provide the basis for lifelong learning.



It has long been all over town: The meth-ods of alleged “quality management” in ed-ucation do not lead to greater knowledge and skills, rather they conceal the fact that students know less and are capable of less. Ever more beginners, particularly in the natural sciences, lack basic knowledge and skills to successfully take up and complete their studies. However, the kind of trou-ble caused by ministerial guidelines which teacher teams are facing and let out only be-hind closed doors, is something the public must know about.

How knowledge and skills develop as the basis of real education and how this can be achieved best during lessons, has been well-known for a long time. Why are teachers not given the freedom to take in-dependent decisions how to organize their lessons according to their professional training? After all, they are the experts.

Performance explosion by competence orientation – a bluff package ?

Since the “PISA shock” politicians and their advisers from the field of empirical educa-tional research claim that quality of teach-ing could be improved and a better PISA ranking be achieved only by educational standards, competency-based lessons, core curricula, comparative studies and central exams up to central high-school gradua-tion. The logic behind this standardization is simple and not completely wrong. One is looking for a binding standard to meas-ure the dubious status of skills and knowl-edge of students. May we believe the advo-cates of these concepts and the supporting press who claim that within a short time an increase in the high-school graduation rate has been achieved and the rate of fail-ing students has been brought down to al-most zero, the number of school dropouts, has been reduced underachieving students have been better promoted and their level of performance has been raised; the ability for studying has improved while getting rid of unnecessary knowledge ballast! For year after year the number of high school grad-uates with the dream grade of 1.0 (or bet-ter) rose while failure rates declined against zero. Who feels like grumbling? Peculiar though, the voices of crafts, SMEs and uni-versities do not stop complaining about the lack and further decline of the quality level of school-graduates. Engineers and students of the natural sciences have become scarce

and craft apprentices that are ready to learn and let themselves be trained are urgent-ly searched for. Are these merely the com-plaints of the diehards and dissatisfied? Or what is happening ?

New quality management – the prescribed leveling of standards

To uncover the cause for this discrepancy and to check the success reports for their truth would now indeed be an important work of research. But so far no one has been appointed to it. Apparently, the eu-phorics of quality management in the ministries and the KMK (Conference of the Ministers of Education and Culture)of the “Länder” are not interested in ex-amining their own measures of quality management in an open scientific inves-tigation. Upon inquiries at the ministries in one or another “Land”, one receives the reasonable information that such scientific research would certainly be of great inter-est, albeit only under the premise that the questionnaire, the aim of investigation and the handling of possible results were dis-cussed in advance! It could not be clear-er: research, yes please, but only political-ly and didactically correct! Otherwise, the imported quality assuring concept of for-mal technique and management doctrine might possibly be at stake, altogether.

A first disillusioning that “competence orientation” was the ostensible solution of all educational problems occurred by the study on the “Abitur” in biology conduct-ed in North Rhine-Westphalia1, present-ed below: Non-prepared ninth-graders had passed the final Abitur-examination in biol-ogy without any problem. Is this the secret of an unforeseen quality explosion? No, but all the answers were given in the text ac-companying the questions, you only had to have some “literacy competence” in order to be able to copy and transcribe them. Ex-pertise? Methodical skills? Wrong! This of course stimulated further, needless to say, undesired investigations. And now look at that: In math as well it showed that com-mon knowledge, reading skills and a cer-tain cleverness for the successful manage-ment of this type of competency-based tasks were sufficient for the central exam.2 Students of the eleventh-grades of a high school (G9) were able to reach at least the mark “sufficient” in the complex task anal-ysis, without having ever studied the nec-essary math basics of the twelfth and thir-teenth grades that were required. Again, the trick is simple: In a task, which concerns the value of a cyclist’s pulse rate shown in a graph, the student does not have to con-duct any arithmetic operations. It is suffi-

cient to describe the course of the curve and to draw the right conclusions from the given factual information with some com-mon knowledge. The detailed work ma-terial supplies all information the student needs to correctly answer the question and to achieve the full credit points need-ed. Knowledge of mathematics is merely hindering, since pupils might assume that they would have to do complicated arith-metic operations for achieving the correct answer. Pupils in countries who are bless-ed with such exams see through this foul play: They feel they are not taken serious-ly. Corresponding comments can be read in the web – it was undemanding and pure copying of given texts. Expert knowledge was not required, there was no mathemati-cal expertise demanded, etc.3

Meanwhile it seems obvious that all this is well-known at the top of the ministries of education and culture and no one denies it. Heads of department participating in this school form in some countries are instruct-ed by the corresponding superior authorities in training sessions that pupils’ performance in all central exams are exclusively be as-sessed by working with the given material of diverse text and graph information. Basic knowledge or additional knowledge capac-ity which formerly used to be the key fac-tor of the assessment are no longer allowed to be taken into account. Upon cautious in-quiry by subject experts of the schools at the corresponding superior department, whether it was not known that almost all the answers were already given beforehand, the con-sternated teachers had to learn that this was very well known. One would try to make it less obvious in future examinations, was the information. Basically, however, teach-ers should not worry about it, since it was indeed politically intended.

Educational standards and quality management in the US –

a cheating scandalWe have known for a long time what may be caused by a misconceived ‘qual-ity management’. Lately, Professor Diane Ravitch from New York, who under Bush senior was greatly involved in the enforce-ment of testing systems, realized and pub-licly confessed her fatal error. Once being a fiery advocate of standards, tests, free choice of schools and Charter Schools, she openly admits today in her book ‘The Life and Death of the Great American School System. How Tests and Choice are Undermining Education’4 that particularly standardization and the including testing

Quality management by marking schemes dumpingCompetence to compensate incompetence conceals the failure of school reforms

by Prof Dr Hans Peter Klein*

continued on page 20

* Prof Dr Hans Peter Klein is President of the So-ciety of the Didactics of Bio-Sciences and co-founder and director of the Society of Education and Knowledge, he teaches didactics at the Goe-the University in Frankfurt on the Main and was a guest lecturer at the College of New Jersey, USA.


methods have the opposite effect to the one intended by undermining any educa-tional standard. Tests were to direct great-er attention towards low quality schools as well as to allow free choice of school for poor children:

“All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope. […] But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost faith.” (p 4.)Since the beginning of 2010 and continuing in 2011 the whole of the US was shaken by a cheating scandal of unprecedented dimension. This happened although over the past few years the pleas-ant improvement of student performance notably in the southern United States was celebrated under the Obama Administration as a success of the testing methods, a law, entitled ‘No Child Left Behind’ that had been adopted under George W. Bush; a law that our politicians like to refer to. This law aimed at assuring an adequate level of per-formance for the largest number of students possible within twelve years and employed financial and personal bonus-and malus-points for well-achieving and poor-achiev-ing schools. The cheating originated in At-lanta, where the questionnaires of those students with insufficient results were sort-ed out and replaced by forms correctly filled in by the teachers. One resorted to cheat-ing in order to obtain a better position in the national ranking and to avoid sanctions for schools and teachers with poor student re-sults. The press even believed that this was done in a silent agreement with the respec-tive governor since in the USA this method of achieving better ranking positions has de-veloped its own culture taken from the field of sport. Obviously, nobody can evade such ranking in the USA of today. Moreover, bet-ter ranking positions yield additional funds and reputation. By now it has been assumed that the series of cheating have occurred in several US states to an unknown extent. The scandal heightened criticism of such testing procedures: “It is this idiotic pressure being exerted on schools and teachers caused by the test results and I believe that those tests not only corrupt the results themselves but also education and schooling as a whole”, said the well-known test expert Profes-sor Haney from Boston College. Since this cheating scandal at the latest, the “No-child-left-behind”-law is considered as failed.

Educational standards and quality management in Germany – the subtler

form of American “cheating”.Whereas in the USA the producers of these test methods tend to demand rising stan-

dards the opposite path is being tread in our own country. Insufficient graduation exams (Abitur) are being retouched at the desk; and centralized nationwide examina-tions are being softened at selected schools under strict nondisclosure until nobody can fail. Students, parents and the public were made believe that better results had in fact been achieved. Universities indicate that it is not true: A major part of the elementary stu-dents is insufficiently qualified for success-ful studies, especially in the field of scienc-es. Consequently, the “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF” (Feder-al Ministry of Education and Research) that had sponsored the concept of empirical ed-ucation research, of educational standards, orientation towards competences and all kinds of central and decentralized test pro-cedures with multi-million dollar amounts during the last twelve years, is now spend-ing another multi-million dollar amount in order to tutor the high-school graduates with a kind of supplementary courses. Simultane-ously, the pressure on university professors is being raised to make them rigorously reduce the failing rates. Only students who complete their studies in the standard period of study-ing are funded by the state. The extremely high failing rates at several German univer-sities in particular in mathematics and engi-neering sciences point to the fact that an ever-wider gap is opening between school subjects which are oriented toward competences and respective university subjects. Apparently, nobody asks for the actual reason: why do mathematics and engineering sciences re-quire mathematical knowledge as a precon-dition, for which the mathematical and read-ing literacy of PISA is just not sufficient.

OutlookIt is high time we return to education in its fullest sense, and steer clear from reducing education standards by diluting and lowering standards with carnevalistic didactics and by forcing teachers into the role of mere teaching guides while forbidding them to teach the ba-sics – above all in the field of science, which is neither a priori there, nor easily acquired.

We’ve known since long how to teach and develop knowledge and skills as the basis of genuine education in the classroom. Why do we not give the teachers the liberty to decide on their own how to conduct their classes on the basis of their knowledge, in view of the fact that they are the experts in their field, and not the empirists and gurus of all sorts, who are currently pulled out of the hat by many a German Land.

Hereby the decisive and sovereign role of the Finnish teacher, who has the liberty to choose from the various teaching methods those he considers appropriate, may serve as an example, as well as the most compre-hensive comparative study in this field by John A.C. Hattie “Visible Learning: A Syn-thesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating

to Achievement“ (5) from 2009, which un-doubtedly points to the overriding role of the teacher in the education process, a fact that still seems to be ignored in our country. It gets rid of the preconceived idea that solely student-centred learning can bring about bet-ter learning results. The results of the study show that the teacher‘s role as the “activa-tor”, giving clear instruction, is much more successful than that of the “facilitator”, or learning guide. It is exactly the often criticised “reciprocal teaching”, similar to the method of development by questions, which achieves top results. Other interesting findings are the poor re-sults of “problem-based learning”. Furthermore the Swiss-German longitudinal study on the quality of classroom teaching of mathemat-ics comes to the conclusion that teaching success can be expected when the teacher disposes of a) a profound and differenciat-ed knowledge of his subject, b) a well-or-ganised lesson-structure, c) the necessary amount of discipline and d) a good atmos-phere in class. To the amazement of every-one including the researchers, group teaching led to poorer results. Where is the teacher who could not confirm without reservations that the four points are fundamental? There is no other country in the OECD, which overemphasizes the methods over the results as much as Ger-many. In contrast to the Anglo-American and Asian countries, and our French neighbours, who all prefer the teaching-to-the-test meth-od, which we would not necessarily like to describe as exemplary. The solution seems to lie in a methodological variety, which makes the lessons also interesting for the students. Instead, the teachers here are being degrad-ed to hirelings of the empirical education re-searchers and constructors of this so-called better teaching, who have no better idea than to advise teachers to produce assessment programmes – within the frame of the undu-ly controversal competence development mod-els – which the teacher is permitted to hand out and collect from the students, whereby closest at-tention needs to be given to avoid any falsifica-tion of the quantitive assessment. And more and more we are obliged to answer the question why we continue mending the crumbling ruins of the Potemkin-style education villages against all bet-ter judgement. •1 Klein, HP (2010): Die neue Kompetenzorien-

tierung: Exzellenz oder Nivellierung? (The New Competence Orientation: Excellence or Level-ling?) Journal für Didaktik der Biowissenschaf-ten JfdB 1, 1–11

2 Klein, HP, Jahnke, Th (2012): Die Folgen der Kompetenzorientierung im Fach Mathematik. (The consequences of New Competence Orientation in the subject of Mathematics) Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik (in print) www.uni-protokolle.de/foren

3 Ravitch, D. (2010): The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Tests and Choice are Undermining Education. Basic Books, New York

4 Hattie, J.A.C. (2009): Visible Learning. A Syn-thetics of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge, Chapman & Hall, New York, http://www.dipf.de/de/projekte/Pythagoras


”Quality management by …” continued from page 19

http://www.uni-protokolle.de/foren

http://www.uni-protokolle.de/foren


The third grade student comes home, drops satchel and jacket in the corridor and marches into his room. There is something wrong, the mother thinks. What’s the mat-ter with the bright boy who usually comes to the kitchen straightaway and talks about what happened during the day in school, with the others, or on his way home? At the dinner table Marco at last voices his troubles in a mixture of anger and despair: “Now I have to read so many pages in this stupid book and find out what is the best joke. How am I supposed to know that!” The father takes a look at the matter. Quite some pages indeed for a third-grader. “Lis-ten, we just make up a joke of our own to-

gether”, the father suggests. Marco shrugs it off: “She would notice, she has read all the books!” Now the father gets concerned: “All the books, what books?” He wants to find out exactly what this is about. His in-vestigations unearth a disturbing scenario.

Reeling off rubbishy programs … Quite questionable methods have found their way into primary schools for some time. Instead of reading a reasonable book together with the whole class, figure out its content together in class discussion, think-ing and arguing about it, the teachers take the easy approach. They reel off lousy fast food style reading computer programs of-

fered by private companies. It works like this: Every child chooses a book which is covered by the reading computer program. Having read the pathetic book he or she has to answer 15 questions at the comput-er. Those are not really challenging ques-

Our children are no force-fed geeseWell-paid teachers as mere computer suckers

by Dr phil Henriette Hanke Güttinger, Psychologist/Historian

Curriculum Canton Zurich“The students shall gain a positive attitude to reading. […] Silent read-ing: The main goal of education is to develop the ability and the joy of in-dependent reading.”


In stark contrast to the professional mandate ...hhg. Not only with the use of computer reading programs teachers make them-selves comfortable. It works in Math as well, for example, with so-called week-ly schedules. Take the following example from a Swiss school.

A good 5th-grader at primary school is gradually losing her enjoyment of school. She does not quite know what homework to do and by what time she has to finish an exercise. Since the summer the class has been doing a math plan instead of math instruc-tion. They are told to work regular-ly on this plan, but they do not know at what time the tasks must be done. This is also true for the other subjects: “worksheets” is in the plan, the stu-dents are asked to serve themselves at the podium. Instructions, as to when the work in each case has to be done, are not given. The parents are asking how they can support their daugh-ter, how they can guide her togeth-er with the teacher to make a reliable study plan and to finish the tasks well. But that is not what the teacher has in mind. For some time she refuses to ac-company the girl more closely and to check her records, in order to make her learn how to have her stuff “togeth-er”. Rather, she tells the pupil not to ask her parents, they would not under-stand anyway, she should turn to their colleagues, instead. She tells her that she will, not help her, by the way, she is to do the work on her own. When asked by the parents the teacher explic-itly refuses to provide worksheets with an accurate title and to hand out dates for their completion. It does not mat-ter, she says, if the sheets will be fin-ished on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday. The pupils are to work just “50 minutes on anything” every day. When the par-

ents ask her once again for a cooper-ation with regard to the mandate of the school, namely, “complementing the educational mandate of parents” to be active, she refuses. Other parents in the class also find that their children never quite know what they are sup-posed to do, that they don’t have a success and are losing their joy to be at school. In the language lesson the students engage in “creative” writing. The individual texts are not corrected by the teacher. At a parents’ assembly, she explains: “It’s of no use it the chil-dren see their mistakes painted red and then will have to correct them.” She will convey “strategies” about how the students may correct themselves. The children can help each other while cor-recting.... and how the resulting mess is to be te-diously corrected again.

An experienced, dedicated elemen-tary school teacher takes over a village school (4th–6th grade) in a rural com-munity from a younger teacher. When handing over it turns out that it had been worked especially with a week-ly schedule, group and partner work, there was less classroom teaching and more self-discovered learning. Parents are happy with the change of teach-ers. Homework and the children’s study tasks had always been unclear. The chil-dren corrected their math tasks them-selves using the teacher-key, corrections by the teacher were rare. Students that could go on to the “Gymnasium” (gram-mar school) after the 6th class were a rar-ity. Only very few manage to rise to sec-ondary school. The majority went on to attend the “Realschule”, the school with the lowest standards . Often, the teach-er did his preparations for the next day during school lessons, so that he didn’t

even have to take home his folder at four o’clock.

With the new teacher, from the first day on, a close, binding cooperation began with pupils and parents. The new math exercises were worked on togeth-er on the blackboard until every stu-dent had understood what it was about, and then was able to solve the respec-tive tasks on his own. At the end, the teacher collected the books, put them into his old school trunk and corrected them at his desk in the evening. That way he could check how the students had processed the material, where er-rors had occured and what had to be re-peated in the next lesson if necessary. He found that many students had some gaps up to huge holes in the math ma-terial of the recent years. In the other subjects it was similar picture. It took a major effort from all sides and a lot of patience. The working day of the teach-er (six-day week) rarely ended before 22 o’clock. Teaching was worthwhile, as it is codified in the elementary school law. Parents and students were very pleased with the turn. After one year, the ma-jority of the sixth-graders, had achieved the academic requirements for second-ary school. But it was also still part of the everyday life of the teacher, to work until well into the evening, in order to follow up lessons and prepare the ones for the next day and promote and stip-ulate each child.

Conclusion: How our youth comes out of school today and is prepared for their profession and their roles in our di-rect democracy, is in large part the re-sponsibility of their teachers. If the po-litical will is there, the teachers can be held again accountable to carry out their tasks compliant to the Elementa-ry Schools Act.


tions, inspiring thought or creativity in order to advance the children’s personal development. The computer program asks stupid questions and offers three possible answers itself. The child just has to tick one of them.

The teachers don’t even have to both-er reading one of the books themselves. In their solution window the correct answer is already highlighted. On his computer screen the teacher can calculate the “read-ing capability” of every student i.e. the per-centage of correct answers. What and how much the student has actually understood, he wouldn’t know that way. In the comput-er program this is called “administration of individual students” or, if all of them are dealt with, “central class administration”. The teacher’s response is delivered via computer as well when the student opens a mailbox and reads it. Instead of a small dis-cussion, a caring glance, food for thoughts, an encouraging gesture or some positive constructive face to face criticism all the child gets from the teacher is an “electron-ic text message”. Just looking carefully at these programs makes you shiver. It is dis-graceful how children are being denied their human right of education.1

… instead of high quality primary school teaching

Such reading computer programs can be found throughout the German speak-ing countries. They are superficial and meaningless. Their producers and dis-tributors are the only ones who benefit from them.

Teachers who use these programs and promote this computerization of the learn-ing process use a cheap way out of their didactic and educationalist tasks which they are obliged to fulfill by both curric-ulum and the Elementary Education Act. The teachers reel off these programs – and don’t even appreciate their students as in-dividuals any longer.

They do not perceive their students as living counterparts any more. Any rela-tionship between teachers and students is cut off. How much the student actu-ally comprehends, where he or she faces difficulties or has unanswered questions, at which point some encouragement may be needed to build up confidence, all this will not even be noticed by the teacher. So the very preconditions to educate and promote the students in their individual development are lacking. This is bound to result in insufficient educational and personal preparation for subsequent high-er professional training. Young people, their families and our democracy have to bear the damages.

Computers ruin the joy of readingOur laws on primary education reflect the common will of the people and state ex-plicitly that the school’s purpose is “en-couraging and maintaining the joy in learning and achievement”.2 This in-cludes the joy of reading. Teachers who read together with their classes – namely texts and books which they themselves are willing to endorse in front of the parents and their fellow citizens – and appreciate and compassionately encourage every sin-gle child in their individual linguistic de-velopment will experience how less gift-ed students, too, will more and more enjoy and be interested in reading. This is the recipe for true equal chances in the edu-cational system.

Exactly the opposite happens if teach-ers hook their children up to comput-er reading programs. At first alone with their books engaging in imaginary jour-

neys (nobody cares what they are think-ing about) they end up being parked in front of a soulless machine reeling off its questioning program. A machine which will not answer any questions itself, which may easily be fooled with some cleverness, and which bursts into prais-es for the slightest accomplishment. All this is highly problematic for the psy-chological development of our children. Parents, pediatric psychologists and psy-chiatrists have noticed that children may lose their joy of learning in entire areas in that process, just like Marco the third-grader. Because he had always enjoyed leafing through a book together with the adults or listening to them reading aloud to him, he was given “Robinson Cru-soe” . He liked it. But after his experi-ences in school he was no longer inter-

Rubbish from the UShhg. The computerizing of our primary schools is not made in Switzerland, but a rubbish import from the USA, caused by Ernst Buschor,1 former Director of Ed-ucation of the Canton of Zurich. In 1998 in the canton of Zurich, he established computers via the School Project 21, which also included English at prima-ry schools and mixed-age classes. Note, what the “Tages-Anzeiger” of 19 Febru-ary 1998 wrote on this event:

“The Project 21 has its model in the US. It (the Department of Education) specifically refers to a school experi-ment in a government-run high school in Alameda (California). […] On behalf of the Education Department the con-sulting firm Arthur Andersen AG, Zu-rich, tested which of the elements prac-ticed in Alameda could be incorporated into the Project 21. Lacking in the Gov-ernment response is the following: The ‘School of the Future’ in Alameda is based on an initiative launched by the San-Francisco-based consulting firm Ar-thur Andersen in 1991.”2

California’s “School of the Future” is a school building without partition walls, where about 150 students of different ages must practice self-dis-covered learning, in the same room and each connected to a computer.3 The Zurich Education Directorate has propagated this type of school most actively.4

With the School Project 21 it hap-pened for the first time in the history of public school that a school project was financed by the private sector. The Jo-hann Jacobs Foundation5 paid one mil-lion Swiss francs, a donor club gave two to three million. Even Apple, Compaq, Swisscom and Telecom were engaged.6 A profound connoisseur of the situa-tion explicitly warned against this step: “Sponsorship has many faces but only one soul: the long-term profitability for

the donor. In the long term it will pay off for him if he invests in the digitalization of the school.”7 True indeed, as anyone can check when looking at our primary schools’ annual expenditure in the elec-tronics sector.

For the sake of mental and spiritual health of our children and our youth, it’s about time to clear off this US electron-ic waste. Quite apart from the financial resources that would be set free for a good elementary school, which is in ac-cordance to the will of the people (ele-mentary school law).

1 On the background on Ernst Buschor see: “How American capitalism came to us”, Current Concerns No. 14 of 2.4.2012

2 Tages-Anzeiger, 19.2.1998 quoted in: Die tro-janiache Maus, Komitee für eine demokratische Volksschule (The Trojan Mouse, Committee for a Democratic primary school), E. Gautschi, U. Scheibler, Zurich 2002, p. 53–54.

3 In Switzerland, learning environments and Mo-saic schools are touted as imitation of this model. In Baden-Württemberg, it is found in the green community school again.

4 The computer science representative in the school department made a promotion for the Pro-ject 21 in a joint presentation with an employee of Arthur Andersen AG at the Swiss Institute for Information Technologies in Education. See The Trojan Mouse, p. 54.

5 Buschor apparently acted in a dual role that he actually would have had to disclose in the sense of honest transparency. On the one hand, he served in a political office as Director of Educa-tion. On the other hand he had closest connec-tions to the private sector, and unfortunately it was exactly to companies trying more and more to take their revenues from state education . Note that Buschor announced himself as follows in a lecture in Lausanne: “Professor Ernst Buschor, Vice-President of the ETH Board, Zurich, Presi-dent of the Board of Trustees of the Bertelsmann Foundation, Gütersloh, trustee of the Jacobs Foundation, Zurich.”

6 See The Trojan Mouse, pp. 54–55.7 Hans R. Dietiker, school administration Winter-

thur, head of the cantonal “development project for high school computer science at the Zurich prima-ry school,” quoted in: The Trojan Mouse, p. 52.

”Our children are no …” continued from page 21



ested in reading or listening to texts even at home. In the case of such a vivid, in-terested child there is a danger of him being put off reading so completely that he just shuts down the whole area of hu-manities altogether and focuses only on the scientific part. “I just want to do cal-culus and real things. At least I can learn something that way” , was one of his re-cent statements. But an important area of his abilities will not develop and will be missed later in his professional progress and his further life. The school would be to blame for such one-sidedness. Teach-ers will have to be trained towards stu-dent orientation once again, as it was the case prior to the 1990s. They are no mere computer program suckers of EU, OECD and Bertelsmann. This is not what we want our tax money be spent for.

Germanists outraged about the quality of German lessons

Germanists, who are proud of working on a high level of linguistic style and con-tent in their classes, are dismayed when they visit the schools of their own chil-dren. They meet primary school teachers who cannot speak proper German them-selves and use for instance only the in-finitive to address the students, like “sit chair”, “pack satchel”, “bring notebook”. Their language is neither differentiated nor in command of a rich vocabulary. Or-

thographics is an issue with some of the teachers, too.

Crap literature in primary school Germanists get angry and upset about the reading examples their children bring home from school, taken out of texts and books classified as literary crap in their secondary school teacher training. Look-ing at the recommended reading samples in detail one understands the outrage. A book about Gruselfax the witch is for in-stance recommended for grade two with the following summary: “Gruselfax the witch likes everything dark and creepy best. She abhors nice gardens with flow-ers and butterflies. That is why she brews a terrible witch magic stew with Klumpi and Schniefel, her assistants, which should destroy anything beautiful […] Will that make her witch of the year?” Or for third-graders “The wolves in the walls” is rec-ommended, “to scare children and adults” . “The wolves, which are sketched incredibly vivid and dangerous, suddenly burst right down on them. They destroy, shake up and threaten the existence, but only until they themselves get chased. Now everything is like it used to be. Until the next time. Lucy is aware of the danger lurking in the walls any time.” Such texts are just a disaster for the spiritual and psychological develop-ment of our children and may even result in sequelae such as paranoid or psychotic deviations in later life.

Teachers ignore the Elementary School Act

The teacher reeling of his or her comput-er reading programs does not even real-ize what he is busily stuffing into his chil-dren. That way he ignores the Elementary School Act. Our children are no force-fed geese! They are entitled to have a teacher who “is committed to Christian, human-ist and democratic values” – as the Ele-mentary School Act puts it.3 Teachers have to carefully choose their teaching materi-al according to these criteria. They have to stick to educational material evaluated on the basis of the Elementary School Act. Crap literature stands in sharp contrast to that. Spam software which may be down-loaded from some private provider for a license has to be kept out of our schools.

It is well-known that children from the second or third grade onwards will pick up contents from their reading texts which will stay with them right onto professional or university training. They will later have an impact on how they feel, think and act, will influence their ethics, compassion and creativity.

Enough with the easy wayAre today’s teachers no longer capable to face their classes and directly address their students, enthusing them for style

and content of the German language? It cannot be true that well-trained, well-paid teachers who should impart the tradition of the language of poets and scholars on to future generations prefer to offer com-puter-sucking language lessons from the bottom sediments of the internet, polish our children off with that and drive them slowly but steadily into stupidity and dig-ital dementia – consult Manfred Spitzer4 for further reading.

If teachers dispose of their educational tasks by stuffing computerized crap into their students, this is nothing but mental laziness. This easy-going way is no longer tolerated by parents, master craftsmen or authorities. The teachers have to remind themselves of their duty, defined for them by the Elementa-ry School Act. They ought to take this will of the people serious again and put it into prac-tice with care and commitment.

Moreover, a compulsory annual re-fresher course for teachers – based on the values of our Elementary School Act – should be considered, similar to the ones we know from our militia army. •1 Art. 26(2) Universal Declaration of Human

Rights. 1948 2 Cf. Part 1: Par.2.4 Elementary School Act of the

Canton of Zurich of 7.2.20053 Elementary School Act of the Canton of Zurich of

7.2.20054 Manfred Spitzer: Digitale Demenz. Wie wir uns

und unsere Kinder um den Verstand bringen. 2012

”Our children are no …” continued from page 22

After finishing secondary school: neither capable of teaching nor of democracy

hhg. Small and medium enterpris-es (SMEs) express their concerns of not finding any suitable apprentic-es or trainees any longer, resulting in a shortage of qualified employees in a few years with the correspond-ing damage to the national econo-my. The training chief of Larag (Last-wagen-Reparatur AG), which runs its own training center, expressed it as follows: “The middle and better stu-dents go to a vocational school, or visit the Canton school, the less com-petent fail because of our require-ments.” They lack the necessary mo-tivation, and academic requirements are insufficient. To blame the young people for this deficiency is inap-propriate. The teachers are respon-sible for this since they had them in their care for 9 years and 30 hours per week.

Source: Thurgauer Zeitung on 14.12.2012

Current ConcernsThe international journal for independent

thought, ethical standards, moral responsibility, and for the promotion and respect

of public international law, human rights and humanitarian law

Publisher: Zeit-Fragen CooperativeEditor: Erika VögeliAddress: Current Concerns, P.O. Box, CH-8044 ZurichPhone: +41 (0)44 350 65 50Fax: +41 (0)44 350 65 51E-Mail: [email protected]

Subscription details: published regularly electronically as PDF file

Annual subscription rate ofSFr. 40,-, € 30,-, £ 25,-, $ 40,-for the following countries:Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, , Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hongkong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Nether-lands, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, USA

Annual subscription rate ofSFr. 20,-, € 15,-, £ 12,50, $ 20,-for all other countries.

Account: Postscheck-Konto: PC 87-644472-4

The editors reserve the right to shorten letters to the editor. Letters to the editor do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Current Concerns.

© 2013. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


On the lazy tour in our vocational schools

hhg. As early as 2001, the “Institut für Lehrerbildung und Berufspädagogik, ILEB” (Institute for Teacher Training and Vocational Educational Theory) the Ed-ucation Department University Office of the Canton of Zurich, propagated “learning in a virtual classroom.” On the part of the government, teachers here receive instructions on how to cross their legs and make themselves comfortable and at the same time force-feed stu-dents electronically without having to be present. Here is the offer: “How can I give a good lesson without being in per-son in the classroom? – Become a Web Teacher. An introduction to web-based lessons not only for male and female language teachers.”1

As one apprentice showed me as an example from his course material it works like this: The students receive some written documents on the sub-ject “Society”, which is divided into sub-themes such as family, education, social networking, responsibility, prosperity, environment, etc. The students’ task is to create a blog entry (20 complete sen-tences) to one of the sub-themes and to attach a suitable link. In addition, the

student should comment 5 blog entries of classmates in complete sentences. I let the apprentice show me some blog en-tries with his comments. They showed that the issue had neither been worked on with the students, nor elaborated. So a apprentice wrote about “prosperity”: “When I look for myself and others do so as well, it means looking for every-body.” Or this example: “When I have all the financial means to buy whatev-er I want, it means there is affluence.” Such statements, larded with spelling mistakes, are the proof of the teachers´ guild’s shortcomings, no longer fullfill-ing their tasks. When I asked where the teacher’s comment on the blog entry was, and what he had said with regard to the spelling, the apprentice replied: “He makes no comment.”

This is shameful for our vocational schools which should actually develop and complete the democratic compe-tences of young people.1 ILEB, – Education Department University Of-fice of the Canton of Zurich, Offer 2/2001, page 23, quoted in “The Trojan Mouse, Committee for a Democratic basic primary and secondary school.” Eliane Gautschi, Ursula Scheibler, Zu-rich 2002, p.63

With “gamification” advancing digital dementia

hhg. On the education website of the Technical College of Higher Education Northwestern Switzer-land and the Teacher Training Col-lege (file reference 15.12.2012) it becomes obviously: The comput-erization in our schools and the digital dementia coming along with it, is being taken to ex-tremes: The latest crackpot idea is that video games are to be in-tegrated into lessons. The Teach-er Training College of Solothurn has established an extra “game-classroom” (Game Domain): “In Switzerland the Teacher Training College is accepting a pioneering role with reference to ‘Game Do-main’. Future and present teach-ers learn to render the potential of games suitable for teaching.” And a lecturer in media educa-tion is topping it: “An integra-tion of playful elements into the school routine is called ‘gamifica-tion’ by the game research. This allows a teacher to use the learn-ing-related aspects of the enter-tainment culture games, without neglecting the fun factor.“Source: Aargauer Zeitung of 15.12.2012

At present, new types of schools are fash-ionable: community schools, mosaic schools, houses of learning, learning envi-ronments or whatever they may be called. All of them have one thing in common: They operate with positive terms like community, individually aligned learn-ing, accepting heterogeneity – promises they usually do not keep, and which in-deed, with regard to these concepts’ con-struction, are very hard to be implement-ed, even if it were intended. So they are actually a bluff package, pure propaganda. This can well be illustrated when it comes to community education.

It is no accident that in Switzerland’s various cantonal constitutions commu-nity education is one of the elementa-ry school’s main tasks. Community edu-cation includes many different qualities, such as listening to each other, responding to each other, serving each other, develop-ing mutual interest, developing empathy for the other’s situation, participating in talks and discussions, discussing conflicts and looking for viable, fair solutions, etc.

All these are qualities a person needs to have in a democratically oriented society, without which a mutually supportive so-

ciety cannot develop. The origins of these demands coincide with the birth of our el-ementary school: At school all residents are to receive so much knowledge and per-sonal development that they will become fellow citizens ready for democracy. This was one of the main requests posed to the elementary school, since with the imple-mentation of this postulate one of the main conditions for the development of a func-tioning direct democratic state was given. This still applies today – in any case our Constitution makes provision for that.

Hence, the school has the task of pro-moting this quality of feeling and caring for one’s fellows. This is called empathy development, the foundation of a fruitful cooperation, of a constructive class cli-mate. The pupil however brings with him a lot of conditions that may inhibit his development: bad models and examples from the media or the real world, certain retreating and avoiding movements that he developed in his individual life. It is the teacher’s task to detect such mal-develop-ments, and to counter them. These are not simply developmental deficits that may al-ways arise in education, but negative role models delivered from outside, like car-

toon characters, monsters and other fig-ures. All of them have a loss of reality in common, which impedes community edu-cation and also learning.

School reflects our society. Divergent values, conservative, religious, modern, overburdened, wayward life-plans meet and are manifest in the children’s atti-tude towards life and learning. Pupils, who have been calmed down with TV or medication in their early years, are greatly challenged and also at risk by this task of community building. However, they must not be left behind, either.

The foundation for this sense of hu-maneness, the foundation of any active community is, of course, laid in the fam-ily. The kindergarten follows, in which the first steps towards the greater commu-nity are taken, and finally school, where the emerging class community has to face the task of targeted and scheduled learn-ing together. Every teacher knows what it means, if he cannot build on what should have been laid in the preceding levels. Where preparation in the family for com-mon life fails or is insufficient, a lot of

What are schools’ tasks?by Roland Güttinger



work is left to the school that can rarely be properly compensated for. And the same applies to the tasks of kindergarten, of pri-mary school and the upper school. They all have to perform their specific tasks, so that the young person finds his way in the larger community, is able to develop friendships, and cooperation becomes pos-sible, and that interest in the tasks of so-ciety is so far developed, that he wants to learn an appropriate profession to become an indispensible member of this commu-nity wheelwork.

An important element in this process is the children’s learning together with other pupils and with their teacher. The teacher knows which way to go, during the hour, the day, the week and the school year. He conceives of the difficulties ahead, he knows the pitfalls of the subject, he knows for sure the steps of gradual introduction and he knows that despite great heteroge-neity, all of his students are in fact capable of understanding and solving the proper-ly maturity-orientated tasks by themselves within a certain period of time. Of course, in this context, the right teaching materials play an important role, but that is another chapter to be considered.

In this learning process of studying to-gether, the classroom community, partic-

ularly in form of class discussion, is of enormous importance. This does not work without careful listening, to what one’s classmates say, as well, confirm or correct, in case you understood something else; not without asking questions if uncertain-ties remain, without exposing oneself to possible solutions, without allowing one-self to be told or explained something by others. This delicate process is so complex and extensive that its importance is often underestimated. But without this interac-tion among everybody, this ability to stand on common ground, the community does not come about.

Above we tried to outline an optimal process that in the situation of the class demands the teacher’s highest exper-tise: an absolute mental and emotional alertness and awareness, care in advanc-ing, prudence in dealing with each indi-vidual, over-viewing the dynamics in the classroom and the interpersonal processes among the pupils. Individual efforts can often lead to misunderstandings. Clumsi-ness, insulting comments must not only be perceived, but properly interpreted or corrected. Feedback has to be given very carefully and individually to the point, and the adult’s joy about the shared progress must always be perceptible.

It is obvious that this task does not suc-ceed equally well every day. First of all, you can always do better or differently and

also as a teacher you are always learning something new. This constitutes the fas-cinating and fulfilling component of the profession, however, every day one is mo-tivated to improve oneself at this demand-ing task together with the pupils. Second-ly, we educators need support and further training in this field, – seriously and deep-ly dealing with the phenomenon of the in-dividual student and of course with our own personalities. Here we never stop learning, and this is something with which we can also learn to live well.

If we now think of the new types of schools, it is just there that the task of shared working and learning is avoided by the extensive use of computers, of ready-to-use learning programs – no matter how sophisticated they are – of the very frequently propagated individual learn-ing, when everyone is doing something else. True, this is perhaps the most diffi-cult element of school management, be-cause among other things, the disciplinary problems have to be solved. But person-al shortcomings cannot be circumnavigat-ed by any change in structure, by any “re-form” indeed; with this one can only avoid one’s own personal development. It is a pity – because we have the best job, there is on earth: In constant exchange with young people tackling the great questions of life and society, and preparing them as well as possible for these tasks. •

thk. The illustrated book “Strategies of Life – Provisions in the Fauna”, published by the Swiss insurance cooperative “Mo-bilar” in cooperation with the Zurich Zoo acquaints its readers with the reality of (animal) life. The titles of the individual chapters alone, such as “Living nicely in the animal kingdom”, “All about breed-ing” or “Life and survival in the crowd” document that in some areas animal and human behaviors are not that far apart.

Animals and man endowed with rea-son are basically orientated towards the environment and its reality and draw their common conclusions from their experi-ence most of the time. Animals have the advantage of not being exposed to manip-ulations by private or political interests. They rely only on themselves, their in-stinct, their experience and the members of the species. While reading however, the question arises what we humans may learn from the animals that are exposed to a vast number of threats in the wild. On our jour-ney through the present work we learn that this is quite a lot.

In the long period of their existence, animals have developed complex strate-gies that ensure their common survival. In the preface of the illustrated book, Markus Hongler, the CEO of the Swiss “Mobil-iar”, is getting to the heart of it, “Strict-ly speaking, nature is a single terrific ‘in-surance company’”. The dangers animals are exposed to are manifold and often life-threatening. All the more important for all

living beings is to be capable of develop-ing an adequate protection of their lives. “Each species fosters its own provisions, precisely geared to its specific needs in order to survive in that rough nature”.

And we as human beings, how do we behave? At times, one seems to discover that this healthy and natural degree of re-alism that mankind is endowed with in the extreme got lost through excessive pros-perity and carelessness in the course of the past decades. (See box)

This way, people in our country still live for the day. They are barely aware of the fact that the positive achievements of today like sufficient nutrition, effective medicine, good education, an excellently functioning democracy and peaceful coex-istence were achieved by our forefathers, under both, much enthusiasm and passion as well as under biggest efforts and depri-vation and ultimately under threat to their own existence. They have passed this ut-terly valuable heritage on to us in trust of

“We human beings have turned away from our roots in nature. New risks threaten our lives and those of our families. We are, however, not spared to thoroughly estimate these new risks and to take precautions against them. What has emerged in evolution over millions of years and proved well, cannot be all that bad. Why don’t we watch animals how they take provi-sions (…) in all areas of life? (…) Hence, the wording still counts: Provision is better than cure.“

Alex Rübel, Director of the Zurich Zoo(Translation Current Concerns)


”What are schools’ tasks?” continued from page 24

“Strategies of Life”“Provisions in the Fauna”


Marmots live in extended familiesThere are several good reasons to get together with other mem-ber of the species in a residen-tial community. Herbivores must respond appropriately to the in-genuity of the carnivores, oth-erwise, sooner or later, they are lost not only as a single animal, but also as a species. It is impor-tant to develop an appropriate defence against any kind of ag-gressive strategies. The safest way to protect oneself from ag-gressors is not to be discovered by them. Many animals retreat for this purpose back into a quiet corner, where they are also shel-tered against wind and weath-er. Preys invest even more into their security strategy by provid-ing a shelter for themselves, be it a cave, or a protective casing like a snail shell, a caddis fly larvae, a seashell or a turtle shell.

Underground labyrinthsAlpine marmots spend a major part of their lifetime below the ground. They are well-equipped diggers with a muscular, com-pact body and long, thick claws, which are worn-out by their burrowing. With the four-toe- paws earth and stones are loos-ened and with the five-toe-hind feet hurled backwards and transported out of the burrow. The “Munggen” often loosen

the bigger lumpswith the help of their teeth. As a result mas-sive underground constructions grow and their size can be es-timated reasonably by the ex-cavated material that grows in front of the burrows to consid-erable knolls.

In the subterranean corridors and hollows their most danger-ous predator, the golden eagle, can not chase them. Howev-er, in the marmot families there are no special guards warn-ing their fellow species by whis-tling, although this is stubborn-ly claimed. When there is danger ahead, especially those animals are whistling which are in front of the burrow and can immedi-ately take shelter, while the oth-ers are running for their lives. With different whistles they can inform their species about the degree of danger and probably also about who the attacker is. Although golden eagles nosedive towards the intended targets, marmots still have great chances to save their skins.

Family groups of up to twenty members share a burrow. At the end of September they disappear beneath the ground for six to seven months and cuddle close-ly in their hay padded sleepy hol-lows. Mainly the young and the not optimally nourished adult

animals who could not store enough fat during the summer to avoid freezing to death bene-fit from the hollows. In extreme cases their body temperature drops to 33° Fahrenheit, but in-creases shortly at regular inter-vals to almost 103° Fahrenheit. The biological fathers and male siblings take care of the young marmots. For Walter Arnold, who explores the Alpine Marmots in Berchtesgaden National Park and in Avers Valley in Grisons, this was a surprise: “In contrast to the males of most mammals, marmot fathers are painstakingly caring about the welfare of their off-spring and the elder brothers ap-pear to be growing into a role as helpers. A marmot female would be unable to cope with caring for her offspring during hibernation, after the exhausting bearing and suckling. Even one pair of par-ents on their own has a prob-lem to get their siblings through the winter. Only the hibernation in the extended family, in which the energetic cost of warming the young is spread on many re-lated animals, assures the mar-mots’ survival of a severe winter in the high mountains.“

Extracts of the book “Strategies of life” p.59/60


picture keystone


preserving and maintaining as well as de-fending it against external and internal as-saults.

In the animal world, preserving life is paramount. Alex Rübel, director of the Zurich Zoo, who is in daily close contact with his animals, reports first hand in the preface that “countless patterns are de-signed to eliminate the risks or minimize them at least.” Preserving the species is paramount. According to Alex Rübel, “The first circle concerns social behav-ior, family life, the encounter with the fel-low animal, reproduction and bringing up the young. The second circle is about food supply. The often underestimated third circle regarding cost, is about avoidance of the alien thus taking provisions so to speak so that no harm is done to oneself or to one’s own offspring.” Doesn’t this re-mind (us) of some basic principles that are also decisive for the coexistence of human beings? The generation model, the militia system, our direct democratic common-wealth in the sense of community autono-my, comprehensive education, youth pro-tection, sustainable agriculture, military defense . . . ?

The persuasiveness that we humans need, seems to be self-evident for some

animals as for instance the blood breast baboons. “The better they [the group of animals] are organized and prepared for surprise, the more successful life is for the singular individual as well as that of the entire group.”

In very appealing texts and marvelous pictures, the author Claudia Schnieper re-counts the life of animals in countless ex-amples. From the smallest insect to the

15-meter grey whale, a mammal of our seas, that shows a distinct social behavior.

For someone who wants to be inspired by the animal world and who wants to learn from other big or small terrestri-als, this book is an indispensible treasure. Whether birds, insects, fish or the well-known “Mungga” (marmots) – all animals are somehow fascinating and are part of Creation. •

”‘Strategies of Life’” continued from page 25

Animals have developed ingenious strategies to sustain life and to pass it on to the next generation. Some invest in pomp and splendor, oth-ers in solid structures. They move on several thousand miles and fast for months, so that their descend-ants grow under optimal conditions. The cold and times scarce of nour-ishment are defied with provisions and deep sleep. Whether in the Alps or in the tropical rainforest: Preven-tion as a survival strategy has also proved effective in the animal king-dom. Sometimes it makes sense to organize in a crowd in order to out-smart predators. Others save energy with unique methods of locomotion or take it as cozy as possible for the same purpose. And if all that is not enough, Mother Nature opens the

bag of tricks: bluffing and cheating is allowed when it comes to saving one’s own skin ...

Blurb of the book


ISBN 978-3-03784-025-2

Current ConcernsThe international journal for independent thought, ethical standards, moral responsibility, and for the promotion

and respect of public international law, human rights and humanitarian law

Subscribe to Current Concerns – The journal of an independent cooperativeThe cooperative Zeit-Fragen is a politically and financially independent organisation. All of its mem bers work on a voluntary and honorary basis. The journal does not accept commercial advertisements of any kind and receives no financial support from business organisations. The journal Current Concerns is financed exclusively by its subscribers. We warmly recommend our model of free and independent press coverage to other journals. Annual subscription rate ofCHF 40,-; Euro 30,-; USD 40,-; GBP 25,-for the following countries:Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hongkong, Iceland, Ireland, Is-rael, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Swit-zerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, USAAnnual subscription rate ofCHF 20,-; Euro 15,-; USD 20,-; GBP 12,50for all other countries.Please choose one of the following ways of payment:- send a cheque to Current Concerns, P. O. Box, CH-8044 Zurich, or- send us your credit card details (only Visa), or- pay into one of the following accounts:CH: Postscheck-Konto (CHF): 87-644472-4 IBAN CH91 0900 0000 8764 4472 4 BIC POFICHBEXXXCH: Postscheck-Konto (Euro): 91-738798-6 IBAN CH83 0900 0000 9173 8798 6 BIC POFICHBEXXXD: Volksbank Tübingen, Kto. 67 517 005, BLZ 64190110 IBAN DE12 6419 0110 0067 5170 05 BIC GENODES1TUEA: Raiffeisen Landesbank, Kto. 1-05.713.599, BLZ 37000 IBAN AT55 3700 0001 0571 3599 BIC RVVGAT2B

the eu, bologna and the next thousand-year reichschool and education system, and to evalu - ate it...

Documents